Representing the Unrepresentable

Representations of the unreal reality of trauma

in graphic narratives

Siril Sæther Færestrand

A Thesis Presented to The Department of Literature, Area Studies

and European Languages. In partial fulfilment of the

Requirements for the Master of Arts Degree

UNIVERSITY OF OSLO

Supervisor: Rebecca Scherr

Spring 2017

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Representing the Unrepresentable

Representations of the unreal reality of trauma in graphic narratives

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© Siril Sæther Færestrand

2017

Representing the Unrepresentable

Siril Sæther Færestrand

http://www.duo.uio.no

Print: Reprosentralen, University of Oslo

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Summary

This thesis examines the different ways in which the comics medium resonates

with theoretical work on trauma. Trauma theory is applied to my subjects to

examine how trauma is represented on the comics’ page. The chosen subjects for

my thesis are the following graphic memoirs: Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life

and Other Stories (1998) and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002), as well as Alison

Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006) and Are You My Mother? A Comic

Drama (2012). The thesis observes how the comics medium is employed in each

of the chosen subject to effectively represent the unspeakable reality of lived

traumatic experiences. The thesis demonstrates the intimate connection between

the structure of graphic narrative and the inherently fragmented nature of

traumatic memory. Concepts such as closure, testimony and autobiography are

explored with regards to my chosen subjects. Through close-reading and close-

looking I will explore the tensions of the graphic narrative and argue that it is

precisely in the “in-betweenness” of comics that the unreal reality of trauma

becomes speakable and representable.

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Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I want to thank Professor Rebecca Scherr for opening my eyes

to the exciting world of comics in her subject The Auto-graphic Novel. Little did I

know when I entered your class, that comics would become a shared passion of

ours and that you would become my thesis supervisor and great conversation

partner. I also wish to thank my friends and family for encouraging me

throughout the project. I am grateful to my wonderful friend Mari for long

supportive phone calls, for proofreading my thesis, and for spreading awareness

of the literary potential of the comics medium to her pupils in Bergen. Lastly, I

want to thank Tara for being her bubbly self and for making me laugh in the

darkest of times.

I want to dedicate this thesis in memory of my dear friend, Benedicte. You will

always continue to inspire me to be a better human being.

Oslo, May 2017.

Siril Sæther Færestrand

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Table of Contents

Summary …………………………………………………………………….................v

Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………vii

Table of Contents ……………………………………………………………………..ix

List of Figures …………………………………………………………………………xi

Introduction …………………………………………………………………………...2

Trauma Theory and the Comics Medium .............…………………………..6

The Subjects

Phoebe Gloeckner ……………………………………………………...9

Alison Bechdel ………………………………………………………..10

On Account of Terminology ………………………………………………...13

Chapter One: “For All The Girls When They Have Grown” …………………...15

“Violation in the frame”………………………………………………………..17

“Remembering trauma” ………………………………………………………..27

“Witnessing Minnie” ………………………………………………………….35

“Minnie is you, too” ……………………………………………………………45

Chapter Two: “In the Shadows of Girls in Flower” ……………………………...53

“The collapse of time, space, and memory” …………………………………….57

“Listening to Alison’s testimony”…………….………………………………..67

“A crisis of representation”...…………………………………………………..77

“An intertextual mise-en-abîme”…….………………………………...………91

Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………….101

Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………..107

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A word on panel size

I’ve come to understand, in a similar manner to Hillary Chute, that the use of

colours and “the size of an image is constitutive of its meaning, of how it

functions” and therefore, I have decided to include panels in their original

colours and also, approximately, in their original size (Graphic Women ix).

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List of Figures

Chapter One: “For All the Girls When They Have Grown”

Figure 1.1 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 73) .........................................................................19

Figure 1.2 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 72) .........................................................................21

Figure 1.3 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 75) .........................................................................22

Figure 1.4 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 67) .........................................................................29

Figure 1.5 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 67) .........................................................................30

Figure 1.6 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 68) .........................................................................31

Figure 1.7 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 28) .........................................................................37

Figure 1.8 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 70) .........................................................................41

Figure 1.9 (The Diary of a Teenage Girl 84) …………………………………………..43

Figure 1.10 (The Diary of a Teenage Girl 143) ……………………………………….50

Chapter Two: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”

Figure 2.1 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 45) ……………………………………………..61

Figure 2.2 (Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 99) ……………………………………….64

Figure 2.3 (Are You My Mother? 59) …………………………………………………………70

Figure 2.4 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 12) ……………………………………………...72

Figure 2.5 (Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 229) ………………………………………74

Figure 2.6 (Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 233) ………………………………………75

Figure 2.7 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 142 – 143) ………………………………………78

Figure 2.8 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 44) …………………………………………..….82

Figure 2.9 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 52) ……………………………………………...84

Figure 2.10 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 148) ………………………………………….87

Figure 2.11 (Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 282) …………………………………... 88

Figure 2.12 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 120) …………………………………………..95

Figure 2.13 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 16) …………………………………………....96

Figure 2.14 (Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama 244 – 245) ……………………………..98

Figure 2.15 (Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic 17) ………………………………………….....99

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Introduction

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness.

Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the

meaning of the word unspeakable” (Herman 1). Judith Herman’s words from

Trauma and Recovery have echoed in my mind since I first came across them. The

word unspeakable is often used with regards to the shocking horror of trauma. In

Cathy Caruth’s renowned publication on traumatic experience, Unclaimed

Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History, she explains how “trauma, a wound on

the mind, is not like a wound on the body, a simple and healable event, but rather

an event that [...] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known

and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again,

repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (4). While

traumatic experiences come in all kinds of shapes, from sudden catastrophes to

the repeated everyday trauma of domestic abuse, there is a shared idea of trauma

as something which is fundamentally unspeakable, unrepresentable, and

separated from our conscious mind. The notion that traumatic experience resists

language and representation has become a familiar belief and is likely based

upon the common difficulties trauma victims experience while trying to

authentically narrate their story. Issues of memory, sequence, and narrative

structure frequently arise when narrating traumatic experience, thus making it

difficult to effectively represent the traumatic event. Herman observes that

“people who have survived atrocities often tell their stories in a highly emotional,

contradictory, and fragmented manner which undermines their credibility” (1).

As a consequence of the common difficulties in creating a coherent narrative,

trauma victims often feel isolated and separated from the rest of the world. The

issues of narrating trauma and the fear of simplifying or diminishing the horrors

of traumatic experiences make it a particularly difficult subject to authentically

represent in any art form. Nevertheless, there has been a wave of

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autobiographical long-format comics that purports to do precisely this work of

narrating and representing unspeakable experiences of trauma.

The explosion of graphic narratives of trauma has only just begun to catch

the attention of academia. Likewise, academic publishing on the comprehensive

area of comics is a rapidly developing field, and this thesis aims to make a

contribution to our current understanding of the ways in which comics and

traumatic experience interweaves. The strong connection between graphic

autobiography and traumatic experience is indicated by the elevated number of

graphic memoirs about lived traumatic experience that have been published the

latter years: Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1991), Debbie Dreschler’s Daddy’s Girl

(1995), Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2001), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003), and David

Small’s Stitches (2009) are a few of the artists who show and tell what couldn’t

have been communicated in any other form but comics. In their introduction to

Modern Fiction Studies’ first special issue devoted entirely to the form of graphic

narrative, Marianne DeKoven and Hillary Chute note how “graphic narrative

offers an intricately layered narrative language – the language of comics – that

comprises the verbal, the visual, and the way these two representational modes

interact on a page” (“Introduction” 767). It is precisely this language – the

language of comics – and how it performs in relation to representing traumatic

experience that will be the basis for this thesis. I’ve become fascinated with the

comics medium and specifically with how it distinguishes itself from

traditionally verbal literature. There are two aspects of the medium that have

become particularly interesting to me: Firstly, comics challenge our relationship

with reality, a relationship we often take for granted. The (im)possibility of

accurately representing reality has gradually received more and more attention

within the world of verbal autobiography, but the issue seems even more crucial

within graphic autobiography. Comics provides us with a whole new cast “to

what we consider fiction and non-fiction, forcing us to confront the assumption

that drawing as a system is inherently more fictional than written prose” (Chute

and DeKoven “Comic books and graphic novels” 190). Secondly, I am intrigued

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by the way comics as a medium offers a unique grammar of gutters, frames,

spatial and temporal chronologies that may or may not follow a logical

organisation, and a distinctive playfully creative attitude towards the medium

as a whole. In Disaster Drawn, a work which examines the role of the comics

medium within a history of conflicts and wars and their traumatic accounts,

Chute writes about her fascination with how comics, “through its spatial syntax,

[…] offers opportunities to place pressure on traditional notions of chronology,

linearity, and causality (4). Due to the visual nature of comics we as readers are

forced to read differently, to literally read between the lines of the page. This

might be the reason why the comics format is said to be a particularly “apt form

for serious non-fiction,” as Marianne DeKoven and Hillary Chute suggest in

their critical work “Comic Books and Graphic Novels” (193). Furthermore, they

underline the so-called “iconic nature” of the traumatic image: “the fact that the

intensity of trauma produces fragmented, imagistic memories” and thus argues

that “trauma itself breaks the boundaries of form, and perhaps can be […]

communicated viscerally and emotionally through the visual” (193). In its basic

structure, the comics form is split between its panels and gutters, balancing on

the edge of presence and absence, of the representable and the unrepresentable.

This thesis will further explore the unique relationship between autobiography

in the comics’ format and issues related to the representation of trauma. How

are the distinctive features of the comics form used to authentically represent

unclaimed experiences of trauma?

I have chosen four graphic memoirs which in their own unique manner

demonstrate this intimate connection between trauma and graphic

autobiography: Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (1998) and The

Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002), as well as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family

Tragicomic (2006) and Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012). These particular

graphic memoirs were chosen due to their unique responses to the challenges of

representing trauma. The four graphic narratives are autobiographical narratives

that depict different sorts of childhood trauma. The selection demonstrates the

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authors’ distinctive approaches to representing the unrepresentable and the wide

range of traumatic experience. Gloeckner depicts a childhood involving a series

of worrying father figures, a young mother unable or unwilling to provide a

healthy environment for her two daughters, and the effects upon herself and her

sister as they grow up in this chaotic family. Her work depicts the cruelty of

sexual abuse and a subsequent destructive circle of drugs and alcohol directly on

the page. Bechdel’s work presents itself as a dual project of firstly depicting a

childhood of growing up with an emotionally and physically abusive father and

a cold detached mother, and the aftermath of such an upbringing in her adult

life, and secondly, of examining her father’s possible suicide, and her potential

role in it. Each of the authors deals with childhood trauma, painful relationships

with parents and parental figures, and the ambiguous limits between reality and

non-fiction within graphic autobiography. Is autobiography inherently real? Is

fiction never true? While the selected subjects certainly share many interests,

there are also notable differences between them: One author describes a chaotic

childhood with unreliable parental figures and the effects of a premature

sexualisation of a young girls’ body; the other describes the result of growing up

in a traditional nuclear family, where emotions remain unspoken, and physical

abuse and emotional detachment is the norm. While their upbringings are utterly

dissimilar, the artists share the urge to express themselves through drawing and

writing. Their graphic memoirs are established upon the diary entries of the

authors’ adolescent selves. Each of them makes radically different choices about

degrees of exposure and explicitness, establishing two distinct approaches to the

(un)representability of traumatic experience and memory.

Comics is a medium of dualities, of binaries, of a constant tension between

seemingly opposed dichotomies such as words and images, verbal and visual

narratives, presence and absence, the spoken and the silenced, reading and

looking. This thesis will explore these tensions and put them in the context of

trauma and memory, with Cathy Caruth’s notion of “the complex relation

between knowing and not knowing” in mind (Unclaimed Experience 3). With a

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focus on the zones of contact between these tensions, I argue that it paradoxically

is precisely in the “in-betweenness” of comics that unspeakable trauma becomes

comprehensible, speakable and representable.

Trauma theory and the comics form

In order to understand the complex relationship between comics and trauma, we

must first have a general understanding the language of comics and the

conventions of trauma theory. Cathy Caruth describes trauma in its most general

definition as “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in

which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, and uncontrolled

repetitive occurrence of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena”

(Unclaimed Experience 11). She explains how “trauma isn’t locatable in the simple

violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very

unassimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance –

returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Unclaimed Experience 4). In other words,

what defines trauma is not the particularities of the event which produces it, but

the long-term response in the person who experiences it. Trauma is produced

and relived through our individual recollections of it. Thus, the understanding

of memory becomes a key issue within the larger subject of trauma and will

accordingly also be examined with regards to each of the graphic memoirs.

Caruth’s ground-breaking examination of trauma determined the collapse of

understanding as the essential foundation of trauma: “The pathology consists […]

solely in the structure of its experience or reception: the event is not assimilated or

experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the

one who experiences it” (Trauma: Explorations in Memory 4-5). At the moment of

trauma, it registers as a non-experience, in turn causing our conventional tools of

understanding, and thus narration, to weaken. This is reflected by trauma

survivors’ common difficulties in relating the cause of their trauma. In Trauma

and Recovery, Herman observes how "traumatic memories lack verbal narrative

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and context; rather, they are encoded in the form of vivid sensations and images"

(38). Caruth also emphasizes the imagistic nature of trauma: “To be traumatised

is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Trauma 5). In their

introduction to Trauma and Visuality in Modernity, Lisa Saltzman and Eric

Rosenberg question how trauma and visual representation are entwined in

modernity (ix). They argue that “the formulation of trauma as discourse is

predicated upon metaphors of visuality and image as unavoidable carrier of the

unrepresentable” (Saltzman and Rosenberg xi-xii). Each of these scholars

emphasise the significance of the visual nature of trauma, in turn, pointing us

towards the comics form: a medium which, in its very structure, carries out

precisely this work of disrupting time and sequence. Furthermore, the graphic

narrative can employ images that emphasise the “frozen and wordless quality of

traumatic memories” (Herman 37). In order to represent the effects of trauma,

and in particular the impact of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), simply

describing the event causing trauma is not sufficient. With the aim of

reconceptualising the relationship between trauma and literature, Anne

Whitehead challenges the common notion that traumatic experiences resist

language and representation in Trauma Fiction (3). We must rethink our ideas

about the unspeakability of trauma. Whitehead writes that “the impact of trauma

can only adequately be represented by mimicking its forms and symptoms, so

that temporality and chronology collapse, and narratives are characterized by

repetition and indirection” (3).

The graphic narrative provides a space where precisely temporality and

chronology breaks down; in fact, its very structure presents the signs of trauma.

The comics’ page is fragmented into panels that are divided by gutters that

disrupts time, space and sequence. It is important to recognise that the graphic

narrative is not about illustration, it is rather a complex process of words and

images that together move a narrative forward. Although comics scholars such

as Will Eisner and Scott McCloud both emphasise the significant amount of

cognitive work which is required by the reader in order to successfully read

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comics, this work is often underappreciated or even overlooked. David Carrier’s

statement from his introduction to Aesthetics of Comics demonstrates how easily

one disregards the complex, intricate relationship between the visual and verbal

elements of comics: “when they are successful, [comics] have verbal and visual

elements seamlessly combined (Carrier 4). This superficial “seamlessness” of

comics, has the potential of hiding the substantial amount of work which comics

forces upon its readers. To navigate the language of comics; its gutters, panels,

frames, temporality, words and images that sometimes work together and other

times pull in complete opposite directions, takes a particular kind of reading. In

a very real sense, comics are nothing but lines on paper, and it’s up to the reader

to make sense of it all. Already in the process of seeing an image form from these

lines, our mind is performing extraordinary complex cognitive work. Thus, we

see fragments of unconnected moments, but our work doesn’t stop there. In order

to create a coherent narrative from these fragments, our mind needs to fill in the

gaps and create meaning, a process McCloud calls closure; “the phenomenon of

observing the parts but perceiving the whole” (63). Closure is the fundamental

principle that allows comics to be meaningful: “Comics panels fracture both time

and space, offering a jagged staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But

closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous,

unified reality” (McCloud 67). The gap between these unconnected moments is

called the gutter, and this space is the very location where “the human

imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea”

(McCloud 66). The graphic memoir is then, due to its very form, filled with gaps

or what Pascal Lefèvre calls non-visualised space (157) that the reader must

interpret, make meaningful, by her own imagination. These gaps mimic the way

in which traumatic experience is represented in narrative form. Whitehead’s

claim that “the impact of trauma can only adequately be represented by

mimicking its form and symptoms, so temporality and chronology collapse, and

narratives are characterised by repetition and indirection” (3) comes into its full

meaning with reference to the comics form, as this thesis will demonstrate.

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The Subjects

Phoebe Gloeckner

A Child's Life and Other Stories (1998) is Phoebe Gloeckner's first published book

and it comprises a collection of more or less autobiographical narratives that have

been written over a duration of more than twenty years. Some of the narratives

featured in A Child’s Life have been previously published in a variety of

underground anthologies such as Wimmen’s Comixs, Weirdo, Twisted Sisters and

Young Lust. The anthology comprises 24 separate comics that are divided roughly

chronologically into four sections: “A Child’s Life,” “Other Childish Stories,”

“Teen Stories” and “Grown-Up Stories.” A fifth section contains a collection of

single-page drawings and illustrations that demonstrate Gloeckner’s wide range

of style, colour and focus. The narratives from the first section depict fragments

of the life of Minnie Goetze, Gloeckner’s alter ego; “a child of approximately eight

years old, who lives with her mother, sister, and stepfather” (A Child’s Life 10).

The stepfather, Pascal, is portrayed as an unpleasant man with an excessive

temper who often turns violent, and later it seems that he has a sexual interest in

Minnie. While Pascal’s impulse is never acted on, A Child’s Life covers material

such as Pascal telling Minnie that “pretty or not, there’s something very sexy

about you” (53), asking whether her friends have begun developing breasts, and

a teenage Minnie having sex with her mother’s boyfriend.

Gloeckner’s second solo-publication, The Diary of a Teenage Girl, dives deep

into the world of fifteen-year-old Minnie and depicts a whole year of her life,

from March 1976 till March 1977. The memoir, like A Child’s Life, has the subtitle

“an account in words and pictures,” but its design is quite different. Rather than

the shorter graphic narratives from her first publication, Gloeckner’s latest

memoir is an assembly of longer texts and shorter sections with illustrations and

comic strips. Diary is written in mainly four representational modes: written

diary entries that are a mix of her original diary and sections that Gloeckner

wrote at the time of creating the book; archival comic strips that Gloeckner drew

throughout the year of 1976-77; short and longer comic strip sections that

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replaces verbal narrative, drawn by Gloeckner at the time of creating to book;

and a total of twenty-seven full-page and fifty-six in-text illustrations. The result

of the various multimodal representational modes is an exciting form that even

challenges the form of the graphic narrative. As we follow Minnie on her journey

towards becoming an adolescent, we see how her traumatic childhood

experiences lead the way towards a lifestyle which involves too much drugs, too

much sex, and too much alcohol.

Alison Bechdel

Alison Bechdel began her career as a cartoonist with her queer comic strip Dykes

to Watch Out For which ran from 1983 till 2008. In 2006, she published her first

long-format comics, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, which became an immediate

success on a numerous best-seller lists. The graphic memoir was named best

book of the year by Time1 magazine, and received great feedback from numerous

other sources such as The New York Times2, Salon3, and New York Magazine4. The

graphic memoir chronicles her childhood of growing up in a seemingly ordinary

family in a small town in Pennsylvania. Bechdel describes a family where each

of the family members live their lives in emotional isolation from each other, with

a physically abusive father and emotionally detached mother. In a graphic

narrative that is founded upon a range of documents such as old letters, diary

entries, family photos, book pages, and newspaper articles, Bechdel provides her

readers with a thorough examination of the dynamics of her family. Within the

first twenty pages of the book she uncovers the two main mysteries of her life:

1 Lacayo, Richard and Lev Grossmann. “10 Best Books.” Time, 17 Dec 2006. Web. http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1570801,00.html. Accessed 1st of May 2017. 2 "100 Notable Books of the Year” Sunday Book Review; New York Times, 3 Dec 2006. Web. http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/review/20061203notable-books.html?ref=books. Accessed 1st of May 2017. 3 Miller, Laura and Hillary Frey. "Best debuts of 2006". Salon, 12 Dec 2006. Web. http://www.salon.com/2006/12/12/debut/. Accessed 22nd of April 2017. 4 “The Year in Books.” New York Entertainment, 25 Nov 2007. Web. http://nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2006/25308/. Accessed 22nd of April 2017.

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the fact that her father, Bruce Bechdel, enjoyed sex with teenage boys and the

ambiguous nature of his death. Alison announces to her parents that she is a

lesbian only months before her father jumps into the road right in front of a

Sunbeam truck and the possibility of a connexion between these two events

troubles her. Bruce’s greatest passion in life was the restoration of the old

mansion they lived in and reading modernist literature. The author has

employed her father’s favourite authors such as James Joyce, Albert Camus,

Marcel Proust, and Henry James as framing devices for her graphic narrative.

She retrospectively frames and re-frames her life narrative with her father’s,

investigating how their lives, while seemingly disconnected, interweave.

Bechdel’s investigation of her family dynamics continues in her next long-

format graphic narrative, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012). Her second

graphic memoir is a companion piece to Fun Home and approaches Bechdel’s

narrative from a new angle: by employing theory from psychoanalysis and her

own therapy sessions, the narrator sets out to explore her complicated

relationship with her mother, Helen Bechdel. The writings of theorists and

authors such as Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Adrienne Rich and Virginia

Woolf become the narrator’s tools in interpreting her own life. While Fun Home

is largely focused upon Alison’s childhood up until her first year as a student,

Are You My Mother? is dedicated to investigate Alison’s adult life. The graphic

memoir examines how adulthood has altered the dynamics of Alison’s

relationship with her mother and depicts Alison on her way to becoming an

artist.

Through close-reading and close-looking each of the chapters will

consider the different manners in which the form of the graphic narrative is

employed to challenge the notion of the (un)representability of trauma. The first

chapter will examine how Gloeckner rejects the familiar silencing of sexual

abuse, observe how she employs the grammar of the comics medium to

accurately depict the complex process of remembering traumatic experience,

demonstrate her techniques for creating a listener to her testimonial narrative,

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and explore the complex relationship between verbal and visual self-

representations of autobiographical experiences of trauma. The second chapter

will reflect upon the different manners in which Bechdel employs the grammar

of the comics medium to represent traumatic memory, to create a listener to her

testimony, to represent a crisis of representation and observe how intertextuality

is employed as an interpretative tool in Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. Thus,

I will explore the specific tensions of comics, and see them in light of trauma

theory. With a focus on the zones of contact between the verbal and the visual,

between what is told and what is shown, I will demonstrate how it paradoxically

is precisely in the spaces between that (un)representable experiences of trauma

becomes narratable and representable.

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On Account of Terminology

The vocabulary surrounding the comics form is a complex and unsettled

territory, symptomatic of the newness of this growing academic field. I will

employ the terms graphic memoir and graphic narrative interchangeably

throughout this thesis with regards to my selected subjects. While the term

graphic memoir is suitable to highlight their autobiographical nature, the term

graphic narrative applies to their narrative character. I will also employ the term

comics, as I have already done in the introduction, in reference to the medium as

a whole. The term graphic novel is a label that has recently gained some

popularity, however it will not be applied here. I find that the term graphic novel

suggests a strong link with the traditional novel, a connection which is not

necessarily valid. Novel implies fiction and fantasy; descriptions which don’t

apply to any of my subjects. As Chute and DeKoven note, graphic narrative claims

a broader designation than graphic novel and is consequently my preferred label

(“Comic books and graphic novels” 190). Notably, comics is a medium and not a

genre. Like the novel, the medium of comics carries subgenres of its own:

autobiographical, superhero, and underground comics are only a few of the

many genres of comics. I will employ terminology with reference to the grammar

of the comics form such as gutter and closure from Scott McCloud’s thorough and

boundary-breaking publication on the specific language of comics, Understanding

Comics: The Invisible Art.

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Chapter One: “For All the Girls When They Have Grown”

Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and Other Stories (1998)

& The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002)

In the foreword to Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002), Hillary

Chute writes: “While it has become commonplace to praise a work for being

“raw,” I can state truly that Diary is probably the “rawest” book I have ever read;

I actually had a hard time reading some passages because of how unfiltered they

feel … But the kind of discomfort one might feel reading Diary – say, about how

much a fifteen-year-old loves getting fucked – is an important kind of

discomfort” (The Diary of a Teenage Girl xiii). The notion of an “important kind of

discomfort” is well-suited to describe the feeling one is left with after having read

substantial parts of Gloeckner’s work, including her autobiographical anthology

A Child’s Life and Other Stories (1998). The transgressive nature of her art pushes

against the boundaries of society, often leaving her readers somewhat confused

and distressed by the pages they have just read. Her art is confrontational,

challenging, and tremendously fascinating. As this chapter will demonstrate,

Gloeckner’s work is continually preoccupied with questions of truth and

representation, and thus offers a great opportunity to further explore the

relationship between trauma and autobiographical comics. Until now, there is

only a limited number of critics who have written about Gloeckner’s work in the

context of trauma theory.5 Instead, previous scholars have largely focused on

Gloeckner’s explicit depictions of female sexuality as a way to complicate and

5 In Graphic Women, Hillary Chute employs trauma theory in her examination of Gloeckner’s

work, but her overarching objective in her study is to provide a critical perspective on the

ways in which women’s comics’ new cultural position today permits them to expand

academic debates of sexuality, gender and self-representation. In his article “Working it

Through: Trauma and Autobiography in Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life and The Diary

of a Teenage Girl,” Fredrik Køhlert also begins to examine the significance of trauma theory

in Gloeckner’s work. This thesis purports to continue the work of applying trauma theory to

expand our understanding of the comics medium.

16

challenge the continual production of visual pleasure for the male reader, with

Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze in mind.

This chapter will demonstrate how Gloeckner engages with the comics

medium to challenge the notion of trauma as unspeakable, unrepresentable and

incomprehensible. I will examine Gloeckner’s work with regards to her choices

of explicitness, her approach to the (un)represenability of traumatic memory, her

creation of a listener to her testimony, and her approach to the complex

relationship between herself and her avatar, Minnie Goetze.

17

Part One: “Violation in the frame”

“There’s a resistance to something that’s drawn that wouldn’t exist if it were

written” claims Richard Grossinger, publisher in North Atlantic Books

(Orenstein “A Graphic Life”). He links Gloeckner’s work to Dorothy Allison’s

celebrated autobiographical narrative of sexual abuse and concludes that “If

you’re talking about child abuse, “Bastard Out of Carolina” is in many ways

harsher than Phoebe’s work” (Orenstein “A Graphic Life”). His words illustrate

the power we appoint to images. Gloeckner’s drawings are confrontational,

complicated, and unafraid. Fearlessly, her drawings depict our darkest

experiences, taboos, and ask questions that make us feel awkward and

uncomfortable. In Graphic Women, Hillary Chute notes that “Gloeckner’s images

[…], consistently informed by trauma, are darker; their combination of

meticulous painstaking realism and their non-realism carries an intense

foreboding” (61). A Child’s Life and Other Stories has provoked many reactions

since its first publication in 1998. The book has been banned in several countries

due to its explicit sexual content. While her work depicts a clearly abusive and

incestuous 6 relationship between a fifteen-year-old girl and her mother’s

boyfriend, it has been called “pornographic” and a “how-to-book for

paedophiles” (Orenstein “A Graphic Life;” “Case Study: The Diary of a Teenage

Girl.”). A film version of The Diary of a Teenage Girl was released in 2015.

However, the movie received an R rating in the US and an 18+ rating in the UK

due to its many depictions of sex (Brown). Director Marielle Heller expressed her

disappointment over the ruling, which ultimately prevented teenage girls, girls

6 Here I employ the word “incestuous” to highlight the significance of the paternal role

Monroe plays in Minnie’s life. Gloeckner describes the relationship in an interview: […] it’s

more incestuous […]. It complicates the relationship between the mother and child. It

ruptures it” (Collins “Phoebe Gloeckner on Reopening The Diary of a Teenage Girl”). While

Monroe isn’t her biological father, he does represent a similar social role in the family

dynamics, and importantly the relationship between Minnie and her mother becomes

permanently damaged because of the incestuous nature of the relationship between Minnie

and Monroe.

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the same age as Minnie, to watch it (Brown). In an interview with Peggy

Orenstein, Gloeckner was asked about her own reaction to the negative

responses towards her art. Passionately, she responds that “there are children

who experience this, who have the penis in front of their faces. They see it, so

why can’t I draw it to make the impact clear?” (Orenstein “A Graphic Life”).

Gloeckner’s firm response, together with Richard Grossinger’s claim,

alludes to the power we appoint to the visual arts. Tolmie correctly reminds us

that “there is usually more buffering in the realm of words than in the world of

images (xiv). She emphasises how brutal realities can more easily hide behind

words than images. “Linda Williams, notes “The problem is that there is no

getting around the ability of such images … to leap off the page to move viewers

(Hard Core, qtd. in Chute 71). Gloeckner herself has also remarked how images

affect an audience: “anytime you talk about sex … the galvanic skin response is

triggered [and] when you combine that with something that doesn’t seem quite

right, like [images of] a teenager having sex with her mother’s boyfriend, it kind

of goes haywire. [Readers] feel uncomfortable. They’re a little bit turned on, but

they’re supposed to be turned off, or they think they should be” (Andersen, qtd.

in Chute 71). Some readers will experience a division between their physical and

social response to what they are looking at. They might feel aroused and

disgusted at the same time, resulting in a confused reaction and possibly perplex

feelings about your own position as a voyageur. Chute links “the disgust and

pleasure” that the visual carries to a “bodily rhythm of reading, further

underscored, and prompted, by the rhythm of the visual-verbal page, a rupturing

alternation between affects” (Graphic Women 71). In other words, the visual image

of abuse is both aesthetically and emotionally challenging. Committing to a

neutral position is difficult if not impossible when dealing with such

controversial images.

“Minnie’s 3rd Love, Or: Nightmare on Polk Street” is one of the longer

graphic narratives of A Child’s Life and Other Stories, and this twelve-page

narrative is also the location for several of the most debated panels of the book.

19

The twelve-page story is the first story in the teen section, and brings us right

into the world of fifteen-year-old Minnie Goetze. The year is 1976 and Minnie is

becoming deeply fascinated with San Francisco’s Polk Street; with its LGBT

community, drugs, alcohol, and prostitutes. The graphic narrative contains many

explicit depictions of sexual exploitation, drug abuse and teenage girls heading

down destructive paths. This graphic narrative was featured in the anthology

Twisted Sisters 2, and was one of the main reasons why it was confiscated by

British customs officials in 1995 (Graphic Women 75).

Figure 1.1 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 73)

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The officials found one panel particularly distressing, the panel known as “the

laundry room panel” (see figure 1.1). This panel depicts Minnie about to give a

blow job to her mother’s “all too present” boyfriend in the laundry room (see

figure 1.1). She is kneeling before him, crying, and begging him to love her.

Monroe is aiming his penis towards her face with one hand, while the other is

holding her head down7. Her tears are mirrored by a drop of fluid dripping from

his erect penis. He responds “Of course I love you! What man wouldn’t give

anything to be fucking a 15-year old? Tell me again how you love to suck my

dick. You love to suck it – don’t you?” (see figure 1.1). Minnie is holding a bottle

of “the kind of good cheap California wine that makes girls cry and give blowjobs

to jerks” and next to her lies a Hello Kitty diary, making sure that the readers

cannot ignore her young age (see figure 1.1). Monroe’s body breaks down the

panel; his head, backside and feet violently break the frame and move into the

gutter. In Understanding Comics, McCloud explains how “the panel acts as a

general indicator that time or space is being divided (99). “The laundry room

panel” shows how this memory cannot be contained within a specific time or

space; Monroe cannot be contained within the familiar lines of a closed panel. By

drawing Monroe’s body breaking the frame, Gloeckner is materialising the idea

of a collapsing of time and space, a concept which will be further examined in

the following section. The panel takes up more than three quarters of a page, and,

with an overwhelming sense of inescapability, it demands the reader’s complete

attention.

The left-hand page next to the “laundry room panel” narrates the story of

Tabatha; a girl Minnie meets on Polk Street and immediately falls in love with.

Tabatha’s mother was a heroin addict and to support her habit “she put Tabatha

in porno films when she was a small child. Tabatha did not emerge intact” (A

7 The identity of this character remains unknown in A Child’s Life and Other Stories; however, some scholars have made the mistake of assuming that the man in “the laundry room panel” is Pascal, Minnie’s step-father. The Monroe character plays an essential part in The Diary of a Teenage Girl as Minnie’s “lover” and her mother’s boyfriend.

21

Figure 1.2 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 72)

Child’s Life 72). A large panel depicts Tabatha giving a blowjob to a transvestite,

the narrator explaining that “sex was a commodity on Polk St., and even though

Tabatha liked girls, she’d often give blowjobs (to gay guys) in exchange for

drugs” (see figure 1.2). The two panels depict similar scenes: a young girl giving

a blowjob to an older man. In both panels, the girls are dressed, while the men

are partially naked. Both men have their hand firmly placed on the girls’ head,

controlling her, and while both girls cling to an emotionally and physically

sedative object; a bottle of cheap wine and a cigarette. Each of them is using sex

in exchange for something she desires. However, one is performing fellatio in

22

Figure 1.3 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 75)

exchange for money, the other in exchange for love. Both of them seem to be

heading down the same destructive path: the next page shows Minnie gradually

adapting to Tabatha’s drug habits. The result of Tabatha’s craving for drugs in

combination with Minnie’s longing for love is perhaps the most disturbing panel

of the graphic memoir: the very moment right before an unconscious Minnie is

about to be raped (see figure 1.3). A faceless man named Gary is standing above

her naked body, holding her bloody tampon in his hand and his penis ready to

23

penetrate the passed out fifteen-year-old girl. This moment is given a lot of

physical space in A Child’s Life, taking up more than half a page, with Minnie,

naked and unconscious, as the focal point of the panel (see figure 1.3). In the

background, we see Tabitha and Lance chitchatting and watching TV,

underscoring the massively absurd ordinariness of the scene. In this space, where

“sex [is] a commodity,” does rape ever become ordinary? The same scene is

depicted quite differently in The Diary of a Teenage Girl. While A Child’s depicts

intensely explicit drawings of sexual abuse, Gloeckner’s depictions of similar

material are treated in a rather different manner in Diary.

In strong opposition to Gloeckner’s explicit depictions of abuse directly in

the frame in A Child’s Life and Other Stories, this memoir takes a different

direction. The most disturbing depictions of sexual trauma are not found in the

numerous comics sections or illustrations, instead they are described verbally

through the textual diary entries. The rape scene above (see figure 1.3) is written

as a narrative absence in The Diary of a Teenage Girl. Minnie has no memory of

this situation, but is confused and worried that something has happened to her:

I woke up a while later and some of my clothes were off and I was tucked

under the covers… I didn’t have any idea how long I was asleep but I still

felt tingly from the Quaaludes…

[Tabatha said]: “Don’t you know what they did? They gave me [the

Quaaludes] ‘cause I let them fuck you.”

I wasn’t upset because I didn’t believe her. I know if they had fucked me,

I would have woken up. She said, “No way, you passed out.” I still didn’t

believe her because I had my period and I had a Tampax in and they

couldn’t have fucked me. She said they took it out and threw it in the trash.

She said I could check for myself… I still didn’t believe her but I was

confused...I checked but I didn’t have the Tampax inside and I kept trying

to remember if I took it out myself or not, because I just didn’t believe

Tabatha. But I couldn’t remember. (The Diary of a Teenage Girl 261 – 264)

24

The decision to depict this moment as a narrative absence has its natural

explanation: Minnie was unconscious and doesn’t actually remember the episode,

in turn emphasising the extraordinariness of the explicit depiction of the rape in

“Minnie’s 3rd Love” (see figure 1.3). Clearly, the panel isn’t based upon a concrete

memory, indicating that the author had other reasons for depicting it. In

“Girlhood in the Gutter: Feminist Graphic Knowledge and the Visualization of

Sexual Precarity,” Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall argue that Gloeckner’s

refusal to hide rape in the gutter in A Child’s Life and Other Stories exposes its

visual encoding as acceptable as long as unseen (96). They examine how

Gloeckner’s choice to depict sexual violence rather than to imply it challenges

visual culture’s investment “in hiding the sexual precarity of girls in plain sight

through techniques of omission and oblique references that groom audiences to

overlook the social fact of sexual violence against girls” (Gilmore and Marshall

95). By explicitly depicting blowjobs, sexual intercourse, and rape in A Child’s Life,

Gloeckner moves the violation out of the gutter and onto the page. Gilmore and

Marshall note that by making physical violation explicit on the page, Gloeckner

enables the reader to imagine the “emotional truth” of sexual violence (107).

There is no escaping from the cruelty of the images.

The intense explicitness of the discussed panels stands in great contrast

with how the artist has chosen to draw the graphic narrative’s closing panels.

“Minnie’s 3rd Love: Or, Nightmare on Polk Street” ends with a third rape. After

Gary rapes her, Minnie increasingly takes stronger drugs, drinks more alcohol

and finally, with nowhere to go, she decides to sleep at a stranger’s house. Before

passing out in his bed, she says to the stranger, who has already placed his hand

firmly on her waist, “but no sex I’ve gotta sl-sl-eeep” (A Child’s Life 80). The last

panel of the page is pitch black with the words “and so on…” written across the

panel (A Child’s Life 80). This scene is depicted radically different from the

previous scene. The panel doesn’t depict any explicit abuse, but most readers will

conclude that Minnie is raped again. The empty black panel, a strong visual

statement of her unconsciousness, and the unforgiving knowledge behind the

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words “and so on ...,” in combination with the stranger’s hand on Minnie’s waist

from the previous panel, leave us with little choice but to read it as another rape.

Gloeckner’s choice to depict abuse so radically different both within and

between her two works, results in different but equally powerful effects. By

depicting the last rape implicitly rather than explicitly, Gloeckner relies on the

power of closure in order to depict the abuse. McCloud emphasises the role of the

reader as a collaborator in the process of closure; the process where the reader

creates a continuous narrative between the isolated panels of a graphic narrative

(66). He observes how “every act committed to paper by the comics artist is aided

and abetted by a silent accomplice, an equal partner in crime known as the reader”

(McCloud 68). Accordingly, the reader cannot understand the last panel of

“Minnie’s 3rd Love” separately from the previous one and so becomes “a partner

in crime” in Gloeckner’s representation of Minnie’s rape. Gloeckner’s choice to

depict abuse implicitly in this case creates a different effect from the choice to

depict the previously discussed rape (see figure 1.3) as a narrative absence in Diary.

The pitch-black panel seems to be the result of the two previously extremely

explicit depictions of abuse (see figure 1.1 and 1.3). The shock of the other scenes

still ring loud in our ears and at this point a disturbing pattern has been created.

We have seen it, Minnie has experienced it, and the story repeats itself. The panel

effectively embodies a strong feeling of inescapability and numbness shared

between Minnie and the readers.

Contrastingly, the juxtaposition of the two depictions of the rape scene

from figure 1.3 in her two graphic memoirs, show the great diversity in

Gloeckner’s work. Not only is the same scene described verbally rather than

visually in Diary, but the words that describe it don’t even belong to the

protagonist: it is Tabatha’s words who eventually describe Minnie’s trauma

rather than her own voice. In recounting the conversation with Tabatha rather

than “the actual event,” Gloeckner is making her readers feel the same

uncertainty that Minnie is feeling. The readers share Minnie’s desperate hope

that there is another explanation of the missing Tampax. McCloud’s notion of the

26

reader as an accomplice is clearly also significant in this case. We’re forced to

visualise the scene ourselves, in correspondence to how Minnie must also

imagine it. Gloeckner recognises the power of words and how this power is

different from the power of images. The two moments take up completely

different focuses: the panel from A Child’s Life concentrates upon the horrors of

rape itself, while the section from Diary focuses upon the impact the rape had on

Minnie and on her ambiguous feelings of the reliability of Tabatha’s words. Both

depictions are equally effective in representing the unreality of trauma.

Gloeckner masterfully demonstrates the unique effects of verbal and visual

depiction of traumatic experience. Gloeckner seems to have found a space within

the verbal/visual tensions of comics to effectively represent her trauma. The next

section will examine how Gloeckner employs the structure of comics to represent

the fragmented nature of traumatic recollection.

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Part Two: “Remembering trauma”

In the first chapter of Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis,

and History, Shoshana Felman observes: “As a relation to events, testimony seems

to be composed of bits and pieces of a memory that has been overwhelmed by

occurrences that have not settled into understanding and remembrance, acts that

cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full cognition, events in

excess of our frames of reference” (Felman 5). Naturally, one must ask: how are

we to comprehend these events that are outside of our usual frames of reference,

these acts that cannot be assimilated into consciousness, these occurrences that

have not been settled into understanding? Next, Felman affirms that testimony

in fact cannot offer a completed statement, a totalizable account of the traumatic

events (5). An account of any kind of traumatic experience will remain

fragmented and incomplete due to the way we remember trauma. In Unchained

Memories: True Stories of Traumatic Memories Lost and Found, Lenore Terr explains

how traumatic memory tends to be more fragmentary and condensed than

regular memory (203); a good description of the basic structure of comics. Cathy

Caruth remarks that the inability to fully witness the event as it occurs seems to

be something which inhabits all traumatic experience: “Central to the very

immediacy of this experience, that is, is a gap that carries the force of the event

and does so precisely at the expense of simple knowledge and memory” (Trauma

7). In Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth Leys describes how the notion of an experience

outside of awareness is essential in the American Psychiatric Association’s official

description of post-traumatic stress disorder: “[the mind] is unable to register the

wound to the psyche because the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and

cognition are destroyed. As a result, the victim is unable to recollect and integrate

the hurtful experience in normal consciousness; instead she is haunted or possessed

by intrusive traumatic memories” (my emphasis, Leys 2). Thus, the notion of a

memory that has not settled into understanding, a wound which the mind is

unable to register, seems to be a shared interest between different trauma

28

theorists. This section will examine how Gloeckner manages to depict these bits

and pieces of a memory “that have been overwhelmed by occurrences that have

not settled into understanding” (Felman 5) in her work. I will look closer at the

three-page narrative “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls” from A Child’s Life and

Other Stories as well as appropriate sections from The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

In “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls”, Gloeckner uses visual and verbal

elements to represent the cognitive processes that occur during the process of

remembrance. It is the last of Gloeckner’s so-called “childhood stories,” placed

right before the “teen section,” suggesting some sort of a connection between

them. In the first panel, she explicitly identifies herself, “Phoebe “Never gets over

anything” Gloeckner,” as the narrator of the story (A Child’s Life 66). Although

“Fun Things To Do With Little Girls” is a rather short graphic narrative, it

narrates several stories and shows multiple layers of narration and cognitive

work in a small amount of space. The first and last panel of the graphic narrative

act as a framing device for the story that is told in-between. The narrator

explicitly refers to the framing story as a “bonus story” which ends with the fifth

and penultimate panel on page three (A Child’s Life 66). The characters that are

portrayed in “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls” remain unnamed, but we

recognise Minnie, her sister, their mother, and their stepfather, Pascal from the

previous narratives. The first panel shows Phoebe “Never gets over anything”

Gloeckner in a supermarket, staring intensely ahead, not directly towards the

readers, but into distant memories of a wounded childhood. The next panel

makes a gigantic leap in time and space, showing an eight-year old Minnie and

her younger sister being persuaded by their stepfather to share a glass of pinot

noir with him. The girls are drawn very small, while Pascal’s head is drawn

abnormally large. As Erving Goffman’s notes in Gender Advertisements, “relative

size” solidifies gendered power relationships in images (28): “Indeed, so

thoroughly is it assumed that differences in size will correlate with differences in

social weight that relative size can be routinely used as a means of ensuring that

the picture’s story will be understandable at a glance” (28). While Goffman’s

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Figure 1.4 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 67)

words are written with the world of advertisements in mind, his observations

clearly ring true in the world of comics as well. By drawing the girls in the size

of dolls or toddlers, next to a man with a head double the normal size, Gloeckner

materialises the power relationship between them directly on the page. Not only

does she show the power he held over them, but also, she manages to ridicule it.

As Pascal pours the wine into the girls’ glasses, he almost looks like he’s having

a tea party with his dolls. There is a bizarre combination of adult and juvenile

symbols in the graphic narrative. The girls look even younger than six and eight-

years-old; Gretel is wearing an Indian headpiece and Minnie has lost one of her

front teeth. On the next page, Gloeckner continues with her creative use of

relative size, Gretel’s face looks smaller than the glass of wine that is placed

before her. Minnie, “anxious to please and wanting to appear sophisticated”

drinks the wine, while her sister, “who was only six” refuses to drink (A Child’s

Life 66 – 67). While the two succeeding pages follow a classic six-panel layout,

there is a complex narrative structure with several on-going narratives, breaking

with the immediate traditional mood of the pages. On the left-hand side, the

panels depict how Gretel refuses to drink the wine, consequently infuriating

Pascal who responds by wrestling her to the ground, and holding her down,

forcing the wine into her mouth. On the right-hand side, other memories, or,

30

Figure 1.5 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 67)

specifically, fragments of other memories are depicted: through these panels, we

learn that Minnie’s drunken father killed his girlfriend in a car crash; that Minnie

had sex for the first time with her mother’s boyfriend; that Minnie used to

violently beat up her sister; and that her mother was unwilling or unable to be a

mother (A Child’s Life 67).

By placing the similar images on the right-hand side of the page,

Gloeckner creates a fragmented, yet sustained disruption of the narrative,

reminiscent of the split consciousness of trauma; “wherein traumatic memories

manifest themselves as intrusions into normal experience” (Køhlert 135).

Noticeably, these fragmented memories are not depicted chronologically; I will

rather suggest that their organisation on the page reflects upon the narrator’s trail

of thoughts. Three of the panels are visually disturbingly similar (see figure 1.4,

1.5 and 1.6): two bodies intimately positioned towards each other, one

dominantly holding the other down. In The System of Comics, Thierry Groensteen

coins the term general arthrology to describe how the visual resonances across the

layout of a comics page can create correspondences of meaning, a term which

seems to be suitable to explain not only how these panels are connected by the

narrator, but also how we, as readers, are able to link them (22). While general

arthrology displays some similarities with McCloud’s notion of closure,

Groensteen’s theory emphasises more explicitly the connections panels make

31

Figure 1.6 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 68)

beyond their juxtaposed neighbours, thus filling a small gap in McCloud’s

theory. Within Groensteen’s theory the braiding of different panels explains this

phenomenon of how additional layers of meaning appear outside of the linear

sequence within a graphic narrative (Groensteen 22). By drawing these memories

visually alike, Gloeckner accentuates the connection she herself makes between

them. Køhlert suggests that Gloeckner, in these panels, “links her own aggressive

behaviour with both the violence of her stepfather and the sexual exploitation by

her mother’s boyfriend, and also suggests the potential for a causal relationship

between the various manifestations of power” (134).

However, the psychological connection between these panels is not only

made explicit through visual echoing, but also through a verbal echo. On the first

page of “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls,” Phoebe explains the mind-set of

her eight-year-old avatar, Minnie: “Anxious to please and wanting to appear to

be sophisticated, I drank some wine” (A Child’s Life 66). On the next page, the

same phrasing is echoed: “Years later, the first time I had sex was with my

mother’s boyfriend. I was eager to be sophisticated and wanted nothing more than to

please” (my emphasis, A Child’s Life 67). By repeating this phrase, Gloeckner

verbally links the two memories together, but also expresses a connection

between being encouraged to drink wine for the first time by a father figure at

32

the age of eight and having sex for the first time with her mother’s

boyfriend,another father figure, at the age of fifteen.

The presence of alcohol is a repeated element, both verbally and visually

in “Fun Things to Do with Little Girls.” The background of the first panel shows

a scene from the grocery store: a mother is stealing a bottle of Scotch, while her

daughter is asks for a box of cereals. The sight of the Scotch whiskey seems to be

what triggers Gloeckner’s flashbacks of her childhood. The next panel narrates

how the stepfather, who was born to Scotch peasantry, demanded the young girls

to drink wine (A Child’s Life 66). Throughout the rest of the panels, alcohol and

its effects are continually present; visually, verbally, or both. Even the panel that

depicts Minnie beating up her sister becomes marked by alcohol, as Pascal’s glass

of wine cannot be contained within his own frame (see figure 1.5), indicating that

there is a link between the alcohol abuse and the fighting between the sisters. The

multiplicity of memories suggests a generally abusive environment throughout

the girls’ upbringing, a destructive atmosphere that in turn might have led the

girls to reproduce the abusive patterns they had learnt from their stepfather.

Interestingly, two of the panels (see figure 1.4 and 1.5) are inserted into the

narrative before the event that they are remembered by takes place, thus breaking

the linear temporal progression into a fragmented space-time, resonant with the

notion of trauma as a visualisation of repetitive frozen images brought to

awareness through flashbacks (Køhlert 134 – 135). The fragmented and non-

linear narrative structure of “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls,” repeats Anne

Whitehead’s notion that “trauma carries the force of a literality which renders it

resistant to narrative structures and linear temporalities” (5). Thus, Gloeckner’s

work breaks with conventional linear sequence and, in its very form, embodies

the notion that “if trauma is at all susceptible to narrative formulation, then it

requires a literary form which departs from conventional linear sequence”

(Whitehead 6). In its very structure, comics are by nature fragmented, consisting

of a multiplicity of panels that are separated and connected by the space of the

gutter. As a form where time is perceived spatially, comics presents us with the

33

capacity of continually fragmenting and materialising time, space, and causality

directly on the page. Leonore Terr emphasises how temporal perspective,

including sequence and causality, is often lost in trauma, while “we remember

terrible events with a marked spatial sense” (199). Thus “we can literally map out

on paper or mentally follow our childhood selves” (Terr 232). This process of

spatially mapping our memories is reminiscent of the specific materialising of

memories that we have seen in Gloeckner’s work. Chute explains how “the basic

structural form of comics – which replicates the structure of traumatic memory

with its fragmentation, condensation, and placement of elements in space – is

able to express the movement of memory. It both evokes and provokes memory:

“placing themselves in space, authors may forcefully convey the shifting layers

of memory and create a peculiar entry point for representing experience.” (Chute

Graphic Women 114). Accordingly, in “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls,”

Gloeckner maps a process of remembrance – materialising memories directly on

the page – through the form of comics. The next section will examine Gloeckner’s

work as a testimonial narrative, observing how the fragmented narrative

presents itself as a testimony in relation to Dori Laub’s notion of a witness with

regards to the issues of traumatic narrative.

34

35

Part Three: “Witnessing Minnie”

In Testimony’s third chapter, “An Event Without a Witness: Truth, Testimony and

Survival,” Dori Laub recognises three distinct levels of witnessing: the level of

being a witness to oneself within the experience, the level of being a witness to

the testimonies of others, and the level of being a witness to the process of

witnessing itself (75). With regards to the first level of witnessing, that of being a

witness to oneself, Laub describes his detailed memories of his experience as a

child survivor of the Holocaust: “I have distinct memories of my deportation,

arrival in the camp, and the subsequent life my family and I led there… But these

are the memories of an adult…It is as though this process of witnessing was of

an event that happened on another level” (Laub 76). Furthermore, Laub notes

that “these memories are like discrete islands of precocious thinking, and feel

almost like the remembrances of another child, removed, yet connected to me in a

complex way” (my emphasis, 76). Laub’s reflections in this chapter are specifically

directed towards survivors of the Holocaust, an event that should never be

generalised too quickly, but nevertheless, his particular reflections about the act

of witnessing trauma are indeed transferable to other traumatic experiences.

With these words, as, Caruth rightly notes, Laub touches on this something that

seems strangely to inhibit all traumatic experience: “the inability fully to witness

the event as it occurs, or the ability to witness the event fully only at the cost of

witnessing oneself” (Trauma 7). Caruth’s words seem unquestionably significant

as they emphasise this paradox of trauma: the full witnessing of the event can

only take place at the cost of witnessing oneself in the event. The following will

observe the different manners in which A Child’s Life and Other Stories and The

Diary of a Teenage Girl are founded upon distinct acts of witnessing.

This section will begin with Gloeckner’s perhaps most explicit take on

witnessing in her work. The act of witnessing is, literally and figuratively, an

essential part of Gloeckner’s third graphic narrative “Hommage à Duchamp” in

A Child’s Life. This three-page story narrates a scene in which Minnie and her

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sister accidentally witness Pascal masturbating in the bathroom. The first one-

page panel depicts the sisters next to the bathroom door with a broken pane of

glass. The readers observe the girls as they peek in through the shattered glass.

The next panel shows Pascal, naked, with his penis in his hand, and, judging by

the look in his face, he is getting close to an orgasm (see figure 1.7). The third and

last page depicts the girls as they are running away, nervously giggling, not sure

what they have just seen. “Hommage à Duchamp” is the first explicit depiction

of sex, the first of many exposed penises, and the first depiction of adult sexuality

in A Child’s Life, and consequently, the readers, like the girls, are startled when

they realise what is behind the closed door. Readers who come across

Gloeckner’s work without pre-existing knowledge about its explicit sexual

images are likely to be just as shocked as the girls. As the sisters open the door,

the readers turn the page, and involuntarily they must witness Pascal

masturbating together. Tolmie reminds us of “the very real danger of

traumatization” and of how “the image can force a reaction in ways that perhaps

the word cannot” (xiii). Gloeckner forces the readers to look and to share Minnie

and Gretel’s feelings of shock and confusion. Although she does provide some

clues of what we should expect on the next page, they are likely to be overlooked

by most readers. The French subtitle reads as follows: “Or, “Étant Donnés: le

bain, le père, la main, la bitte,” which roughly translates into “Or, Given: the bath,

the father, the hand, the cock” (my translation). The multi-layered second page

of “Hommage à Duchamp” (see figure 1.7) appears to be inspired by Marcel

Duchamp’s sculpture “Étant Donnés,” as indicated by both its title and the layout

of the page. Duchamp’s sculpture is created by different components that

together transforms into an installation in which one needs to look through the

peeping holes of a wooden door in order to see a naked female body, lying on

her back with her legs spread wide open (Duchamp “Étant donnés: 1° la chute

d'eau, 2° le gaz d'éclairage”). Her face is hidden, unlike Pascal’s. Gloeckner

replaces the naked woman with her naked stepfather as the focus of attention,

and in the process also replaces the absence of her face with the presence of

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Figure 1.7 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 28)

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Pascal’s. Like Duchamp’s sculpture, Gloeckner’s panel is constructed in three

layers: The sisters, the broken glass door and Pascal are each drawn on separate

levels (see figure 1.7). Not only do the different layers of the panel accentuate

Gloeckner’s abilities to transfer the complexity of our multi-dimensional reality

onto the flat space of a page, but she also emphasises the role of witnessing in her

work. As we watch the girls, who watch Pascal, we straightway become

extremely aware of our own positions of witnesses. Thus, we identify with the

girls, sharing their tangled emotions of disgust and excitement, repulsion and

attraction (Chute Graphic Women 72). Pascal’s naked body, particularly his

exposed penis, is the centrepiece of the panel, as indicated by both the

composition of the panel and by the direction of Minnie’s, and consequently, the

reader’s gaze. Pascal’s head and penis are drawn abnormally large in this panel,

standing out from the rest of the page which is drawn more realistically. Køhlert

argues that Gloeckner’s representative drawing style adds “realism to both the

characters and their environment” (Køhlert 130 – 131). The choice to exaggerate

Pascal’s head and penis size might indicate “their importance to the visual

memory of the scene” (Køhlert 132). Minnie and Gretel’s eyes are wide open, a

signal of the explicit visuality of the memory of this scene. The panels before and

after this scene include dialogue between the girls and motion lines, two visual

indicators of movement in time and space that lack in the bathroom scene (see

figure 1.7). The size of the penis, the size of the panel, and the lack of indicators

that time is passing by, create a moment frozen in time. Time slows down, almost

stopping, before the pace of the narrative rapidly shifts as the girls run away. The

panel might not depict an openly traumatic memory, but it is an essential piece

in Gloeckner’s section of narratives of a lost childhood and an adult

consciousness which is known too soon. Caruth’s claim that “to be traumatized

is precisely to be possessed by an image or event” effectively places this panel in

a series of panels that show graphic narrative’s ability to represent the visual

nature of traumatic memory (Trauma 4-5).

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Noticeably, this is not the first time this panel appears in A Child’s Life. On

the very first page of the book we find the first version of this panel. Minnie and

her sister are looking through the broken glass frame, but in this version of the

panel, rather than their naked stepfather, the words “A Child’s Life and Other

Stories” hover within the broken glass frame (A Child’s Life 1). This peculiar

doubling of a panel immediately gives it a larger significance. By depicting the

girls in the exact same position, only substituting Pascal with the title of the

graphic memoir, it is almost as if the girls are inviting us to join them in peeping

through the broken frame. The broken frame is significant in creating a sense of

secrecy and privacy both with reference to Pascal’s masturbation and to the

invitation to listen to the girls’ personal life story. Groensteen’s concept of general

arthrology 8 explains the mechanisms behind this creation of meaning. The

braiding of the two panels creates additional layers of meaning outside of their

sequence in the graphic narrative. The significance of the first panel only becomes

clear after we have read “Hommage à Duchamp,” thus illustrating how re-

reading and re-looking is essential to truly understanding graphic narratives. I

believe that Gloeckner here suggests that the girls’ encounter with Pascal’s

sexuality becomes their first step away from childhood. A Child’s Life and Other

Stories is not narrating childhood stories, as might have been implied by the title,

rather it depicts a premature breach with childhood and the protagonist’s

difficult road into adolescence. The first panel (A Child’s Life 1) invites us to watch

Minnie’s journey as she grows up, becoming listeners of her testimony.

Laub emphasises that “bearing witness to a trauma is, in fact, a process

that includes the listener” (70), therefore, emphasising the reader’s role with

regards to Gloeckner’s work is undeniably important. Without listeners,

testimony cannot take place. Diary and A Child’s Life both show a strong

fascination with people and particularly their faces. Most of Gloeckner’s graphic

8 Thierry Groensteen’s notion of general arthrology was described in the subchapter

“Remembering trauma” as an explanation of how visual resonances between panels that are

not directly placed next to each other can create correspondences of meaning (22).

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narratives in A Child’s Life are focused upon people; their bodies and their faces.

The elevated number of panels depicting a character, in most cases Minnie,

looking out of the panel and directly at the readers, suggests their own

significance in Gloeckner’s art. I will propose that, in A Child’s Life, this is

Gloeckner’s specific technique of highlighting the readers’ significant role as

witnesses to her testimony. From the opening page of A Child’s Life Minnie looks

at us, with a shy smile (A Child’s Life 9). While it is not unusual to begin an

autobiographical narrative with a portrait of the protagonist, it is not so typical

to continue this explicitly visual connection between the artist and the listener

throughout the entire memoir. By visual connection here, I mean to emphasise

that in A Child’s Life there is a specifically visual rather than textual connection

between Minnie and the readers as our eyes meet. The panels depict a whole

range of emotional scenarios; from a happy innocent child playing with her

mother, to a devastated child with tears streaming down her eyes, or an artist

looking audaciously right at her audience about to narrate probably one of the

toughest stories of her upbringing (A Child’s Life 22; 46; 70). They all seem to ask

the same question: “Do you see me?”

The last page of “Developmental Developments” consists of a full-page

panel depicting Minnie in her bed, surrounded by various juvenile symbols such

as a doll and a teddy bear. The tears that stream down her face are the tears of a

lost childhood. Earlier in the day, she witnessed her friend Cheryl being beaten

by her father with a dog leash, and although Minnie told her grandfather what

happened, nothing seems to be done to help her friend. As she’s looking out on

her audience, Minnie seems far older than her eight years. Her face tells a story

without hope and filled with inescapability; she knows too much too soon about

the brutality of the world. There is a gap between the premature wisdom of her

eyes and the toys that surround her. As she looks directly at us, we’re urged to

acknowledge Minnie’s substantial sadness.

Another panel most readers will probably notice is a panel we have

already discussed: the panel from “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls” in which

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Minnie is having sex with her mother’s boyfriend (see figure 1.3). She’s lying on

her back with a large grown man thrusting himself at her. Minnie’s eyes meet

ours as she stares out on her audience. Her expression has changed. Her eyes that

previously were filled with tears and sadness are now empty, without meaning

or purpose. Her blank eyes meet ours, challenging us to look. We, as listeners to

her testimony, have no choice but to feel the weight of responsibility as her eyes

meet ours.

Figure 1.8 (A Child’s Life and Other Stories 70)

In the first frame of “Minnie’s 3rd Love, Or: “Nightmare on Polk Street,””

Minnie’s empty eyes from figure 1.3 have been replaced with a new emotion. The

first panel is, contrarily to the two previous examples, an explicit self-portrait of

Phoebe Gloeckner, as explained by the “information-bubble” next to her: “Artist

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is shown wearing a luscious head of artificial hair furnished by Rosalie’s New

Look of San Francisco (see figure 1.8). Staring intensely, and daringly at her

readers she makes us extremely aware of our position of witnesses of her trauma.

With a sly smile and large bold eyes, it’s almost as if she’s asking her readers:

“Are you tough enough to listen to my story?” By continually drawing herself

looking at her audience, Gloeckner engages her readers, making them aware of

the importance of their roles as witnesses for her testimony.

In Diary, Gloeckner shows a different approach to the creation of

testimony in her work. The graphic memoir is founded upon the form of diary

entries, comic strips, poems, and illustrations. In contrast to the visual connection

between reader and protagonist in A Child’s Life, in Diary this connection is to a

larger degree verbal. From the very first page of the book, the narrator explicitly

speaks to her readers, warning them about reading her diary: “Dear Dear, Please,

do never read this unless and until I am dead and even then not unless it is

twenty-five years from now or more… If you do read on, don’t you dare ever let

me know that you did or I swear to God I will kill myself or run away or do any

number of self-destructive things. I beg of you, for my sake and yours, do not do

not do not” (xix). Readers must disregard Minnie’s wishes and actively choose to

continue reading her diary if they want to know her story. From its very

beginning, Diary makes the readers participants in the violation of Minnie’s

rights. As the story continues, the readers effortlessly embrace the role of

Minnie’s diary. Frequently, the diary entries directly address a listener: “Am I

bad?” (Diary 17); “Oh oh oh guess what!” (Diary 21); “I seem better, don’t you

think? But how would you know?” (Diary 35). The readers essentially become

her diary, her conversation partner, and her listener.

While the verbal diary entries play a significant role in the creation of an

active listener to Gloeckner’s testimony, the graphic memoir is also filled with

comic strips and illustrations that also have their role in the testimonial narrative.

Køhlert describes how “the images in The Diary of a Teenage Girl bear witness to

a case of sexual abuse in a way that the words alone do not” (138). In other words,

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the verbal elements of Diary show that which the words cannot tell. The

illustration below from “Spring” shows the discrepancy between the verbal

narrator who describes how she “love[s] Monroe to touch [her] affectionately”

(Diary 84) and the drawing which shows an unsettling image of a young girl and

an older man fooling around (see figure 1.9). The young girl intensely longs to be

touched “because then I know he cares about me” (Diary 84). The drawing is able

to both acknowledge Minnie’s pleasure and to show the disturbing nature of

their relationship. Monroe’s unrealistically large hands and unpleasant face tells

a story that the verbal Minnie cannot. The verbal narration continues below the

illustration: “My mother doesn’t touch me much if she can avoid it. Some

mothers touch their children a lot, in a natural way” (Diary 84).

Figure 1.9 (The Diary of a Teenage Girl 84)

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Minnie implicitly presents a reason for why she yearns so much to be touched.

The short diary entry explicitly describes Minnie’s feelings about her mother’s

reluctance to touch her: “I couldn’t eat or sleep. I was sure they thought I was

disgusting. I was never ever so hurt” (Diary 84). Minnie’s raw account of her

feelings differs strongly from Alison’s more detached attitude towards

expressing feelings. The comic strips and illustrations almost seem to interrupt

the long sections of verbal narration. Diary shows how Minnie’s witnessing

cannot be contained within one form; she must patch her narrative together

through the different forms, thus resonating with Felman’s observation about the

fragmentation of witnessing: traumatic experience “is conveyed precisely by this

fragmentation of the testimonies, which enacts the fragmentation of the

witnessing” (223). The compilation of diary entries, poems, illustrations, new and

old comic strips, the work of other artists, and scanned photographs shows the

fragmentation of witnessing in Minnie’s testimony. A Child’s Life and Diary

gather fragments of witnessing, thus refusing the possibility of a complete

narrative, echoing Felman’s rejection of a whole frame “that might claim to

contain the fragments and to fit them into one coherent whole” (Felman 224).

Within the space of a comics’ page where each panel is strangely separated from,

and connected with the next, Minnie has found a space where her fragmented

testimony can emerge.

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Part Four: “Minnie is you, too”

While the previous sections of this chapter have examined the different effects of

explicit and implicit representations of abuse, observed comics’ numerous tools

to accurately represent the mechanisms of traumatic memory, and reflected upon

the role of the reader in listening to Gloeckner’s testimony, I will now turn my

attention towards the ambiguous and complicated boundaries between artist and

avatar; self and other, truth and fiction, in Gloeckner’s graphic memoirs. I’m

fascinated by the intricate relationship between the artist’s subjectivity and the

creation of an avatar, an other, the spaces between them, and how they function

in autobiographical representations of trauma. Hatfield describes how the

cartoonist-autobiographer, “through a form of alienation or estrangement, must

regard herself or himself as other, as a distinct character to be seen as well as

heard” (his emphasis, 114). Not only must the artist see herself from the outside,

but her subjectivity also becomes split between a verbal and a visual self. In

Trauma: A Genealogy, Ruth Leys describes how the American Psychiatric

Association emphasises the splitting of the subject in its official designation of

post-traumatic stress disorder: “The idea is that, owing to the emotions of terror

and surprise caused by certain events, the mind is split or dissociated” (2). In

other words, a splitting of the mind or a dissociation of the self is a potential

outcome of any kind of traumatic experience. Køhlert observes how “the split of

the subject in the autobiographical project is […] mirrored in the psychic

fragmentation caused by traumatic experience, the memories which cannot be

fitted easily into a life story because they create a gap within consciousness that

defies narrativization and disrupts the formation of a coherent sense of self”

(127). While Gloeckner’s approach to the (un)representability of traumatic

recollection has already been examined, I will now focus upon traces of a

disruption of a coherent sense of self resulting from these experiences that defies

representation. The splitting of the subject resonates with the split of the subject

within autobiography. Consequently, the following will explore the intricate

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relationship between verbal and visual self-representations in Gloeckner’s

autobiographical work and the particular effects traumatic experience has upon

our understanding of self. I will argue that it is precisely in the spaces between,

between the artist as subject and the artist as object, and between fiction and non-

fiction, that we find a space where the complex processes that represent the

unrepresentable of trauma can take place.

Lynda Barry asks an interesting question in her One! Hundred! Demons! :

“Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?” (7).

Barry’s rhetorical question challenges the familiar expectation that

autobiographies are always true. In The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore

observes how “as a genre, autobiography is characterized less by a set of formal

elements than by a rhetorical setting on which a person places herself or himself

within [a variety of] testimonial contexts” (3). These testimonial contexts are

repeated and reproduced, with the result that expectations of the form are

established (Gilmore 3). In referencing the ambiguous limits between fiction and

non-fiction in autobiography, it is important to emphasise the differences

between verbal and visual autobiography. Køhlert describes how “in traditional

prose autobiography the mimetic world of the work is constructed by the

reader’s imagination, which creates its own reality and can elect to presuppose a

corresponding externality, [whereas] the reality of the comics page is indubitably

and self-evidently different from what it represents” (127). In other words,

comics autobiography rejects any obligations to authentically represent a

collective concept of reality. This disconnection from reality might be the reason

why autobiography in the comics medium seems to be a suitable space to

represent traumatic experience. Anne Whitehead suggests that when faced with

“the demands of extremity” (Rothberg 14), writers of trauma narratives are

pushing the realist project to its limits, “not because they have given up on

knowledge but in order to suggest that traumatic knowledge cannot be fully

communicated or retrieved without distortion” (Whitehead 84).

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This essential distortion resonates with Gloeckner’s own explanation of her

creation of autobiographical work: “There is a process of dissociation that takes

place when I make a story. I make creative decisions in a fugue state that I could

hardly describe to you, but the end result is, I hope, a story with some meaning

or resonance, something created, with a beginning, a middle and an end, an

encapsulation of feeling and impression, but in no way a documentary of

anything other than an “emotional truth” (“The Phoebe Gloeckner Interview”).

Similarly, she speaks of the mutability of memory and how it shifts with time

and subsequent experience. Gloeckner explains how “sometimes you have to

distort “reality” in order to express what you feel is the true feeling. A recounting

of facts can carry little meaning” (“The Phoebe Gloeckner Interview”).

Gloeckner’s words highlight the important tools of dissociation and distortion of

reality in order to create what she refers to as “an emotional truth” (“The Phoebe

Gloeckner Interview”).

Gilmore observes how “autobiography about trauma forces the reader to

assume a position of masochism or voyeurism. [The reader is] invited to find

himself or herself … or to enjoy a kind of pleasure in the narrative organisation

of pain” (22). When the readers look at Minnie having sex with her mother’s

boyfriend (see figure 1.4), when they see her lying unconscious and defenceless

on a bed about to be raped (see figure 1.3), they must decide whether to adopt a

position of voyeurism and enjoy a pleasure in the narrative organisation of pain,

or select to identify with Minnie’s diminished position in the narrative. This

explains perhaps partly the reason why these images are so difficult to look at,

the choice between identification or a pleasure in witnessing someone else’s pain

is not an easy one. Furthermore, Gilmore explains how “[i]dentification, then,

marks a point of tension in autobiography for writers whose self-representational

projects place them outside the most familiar operations of identification and

sympathy. Such writers might seek to swerve from autobiography’s constraints

as they find the figure of the representative man an image they cannot or do not

wish, to project (23). Experiences of trauma remain outside of our most familiar

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spaces of identification, thus autobiographical authors diverge from the limits of

autobiography and create new spaces where they can represent such experiences.

Gilmore’s notion of the need to create a new representational space for these

experiences outside of our “normal” spaces of identification, resonates with

Rothberg’s notion of traumatic realism: the term describes the range of innovative

formal devices which are used in narratives of trauma to try to make us believe

the unbelievable” (14). Similarly to Gilmore, Rothberg argues that traumatic texts

[are in] search for a new mode of realism in order to express or articulate a new

of reality (14). The graphic memoir seems to be such a space where narratives of

trauma can emerge.

The previous section established how Diary’s multimodal form, its

assembly of verbal and visual narratives, developed numerous channels that

allowed witnessing to occur. These tensions between verbal and visual narratives

generate the space where the self can emerge within autobiographical comics.

Elisabeth Bruss, regarding autobiography in film, argues that visual self-

portrayal poses an impassable barrier between the observer and the observed, a

barrier which is absent in the realm of language (qtd. in Hatfield 116). She

explains how in first person narrative, the narrative “I” easily allows the reader

to become a part of her or his subjectivity, while in visual representation

expression is divided from description (Bruss qtd. in Hatfield 116). In a similar

manner, W. J. T. Mitchell breaks down one of the essential tensions between word

and image in Picture Theory: that text is generally aligned with the speaking and

seeing self, while the image is the viewed object, the other: “The “otherness” of

visual representation from the standpoint of textuality may be anything from a

professional competition to a relation of political, disciplinary, or cultural

domination in which the “self” is understood to be an active, speaking, seeing

subject, while the “other” is projected as passive, seen, and (usually) silent object”

(157). In Gloeckner’s case, in writing graphical autobiography where she

essentially is both the subject and the object of the story, this split is particularly

exposed.

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However, Diary is not only constructed upon a split between verbal and

visual forms: the verbal diary entries also involve poems, letters from Minnie’s

former stepdad, reproduced conversations, a postcard and numerous lyrics; and

the visual narratives include comic strips that progresses the story line, comic

strips that Gloeckner drew when she was fifteen, drawings that illustrate the

verbal story, comics drawn by Gloeckner’s father, Aline Kominsky-Crumb, R.

Crumb, Diane Noomin and Justin Green, a map of their apartment and

neighbourhood in San Francisco and scanned photographs, drawings and diary

entries from Phoebe Gloeckner’s personal archive. The multiplicity of

Gloeckner’s multimodal forms resonates with the fragmentation of an

autobiographical subject. Køhlert observes how “the plurality of perspectives,

[…], including the use of Gloeckner’s own diary as the raw material from which

the narrative is shaped, creates an intricate structure containing different

perspectives on the same events while […] undergrounding the idea of a single,

coherent subject as the author of the autobiography” (137). Each of the categories

presents individual perspectives, distinct contributions, to the creation of Minnie

Goetze in Diary. While the diary entries are written from the perspective of a

fifteen-year old girl, Minnie’s voice at times conceals her young age. She makes

comments such as: “I don’t know where to direct all my sexual energies” (Diary

11); “I really like getting fucked” (Diary 26); and “I want someone to swing me

around, someone who […] has an apartment and fucks good and hard” (Diary

160). Her comments reflect upon the mind-set of a sexually experienced person,

together with her mature vocabulary Minnie often sounds older than she actually

is.

The illustrations in Diary present a different perspective, a different aspect

of the fragmented self. The full-page illustration in figure 1.10 depicts Minnie

watching Monroe sleep. The panel is drawn up close and like much of

Gloeckner’s art, the drawing concentrates upon their faces. Monroe’s face is

drawn disproportionally large and takes up much of the page (see figure 1.10).

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Figure 1.10 (The Diary of a Teenage Girl 143)

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With Goffman’s notion of relative size and how power relations can be

visually represented in mind, it becomes clear that Monroe’s large face not only

shows their differences in age, but also the power he holds over Minnie. The

caption “[s]ometimes I watch him as he sleeps, and I feel so much love for him”

(see figure 1.10), alongside the drawing of Minnie who tenderly looks at him in

his sleeping, also contributes to describing a relationship where the power scales

are imbalanced. This illustration shows, rather than explains, the effects of the

split self. The mind-set of a young teenager is drawn by an adult, thus integrating

their different perspectives into the drawing. The illustration acknowledges “a

Minnie” that the fifteen-year-old girl perhaps does not recognise. Minnie begins

her first entry in the diary by proclaiming her ugliness: “I don’t remember being

born. I was a very ugly child. My appearance has not improved so I suppose it

was a lucky break when he was attracted by my youthfulness” (Diary 3). The

Minnie from figure 1.10, however, has a handsome face and flawless skin,

underlined by Monroe’s facial hair and wrinkles. Chute describes Monroe as the

cherished object of Minnie’s gaze; in her eyes an object of beauty, while the

drawing depicts him as swollen, puffy, and “patently disgusting” (Graphic

Women 83). The gaze of the young Minnie diverges from the perspective of the

drawing.

Gloeckner herself emphasises that Minnie is not her either: “Although I

am the source of Minnie, she cannot be me – for the book to have real meaning,

she must be all girls, anyone … It’s not my story. It’s our story” (Diary xv). She

emphasises that she aspires “to create characters who can be universally

understood despite being constructed with details so numerous that they could

only refer to a particular situation” (Diary xv). Gloeckner’s insistence that Minnie

belongs to all of us, suggests a shared perspective, a space where identification,

and thus a re-constructed subjectivity can emerge. Chute writes: “If her sexual

abuse effaced her subjectivity, Diary’s insistent showing, the rhythms of its visual

interruptions, re-establishes her as a subject: autobiography as re-facement.”

Gilmore asks what is the language through which the self may re-emerge? (42).

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Chute suggests that, “with Gloeckner, who is deeply aware of the power of the

self as constituted visually, in part through a schooling in visual self-

objectification, that language is graphic” (81). Moreover, I would like to propose

that the language which allows the self to re-emerge, to regain agency and

autonomy, is not only graphic, but

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Chapter Two: “In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower”

Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006)

& Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012)

“For nothing was simply one thing.”

Alison Bechdel’s most recent graphic memoir Are You My Mother? begins with

these words from Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (209). The words reflect upon

a character’s recognition that the lighthouse he remembers from his childhood, a

lighthouse with “a silvery, misty-looking tower with a yellow eye that opened

and closed softly in the evening,” is in fact the same building that he now sees

before his eyes, a lighthouse surrounded by “whitewashed rocks ... [a] tower,

stark and straight ... barred with black and white ... [with] windows [and]

washing spread out on the rocks to dry” (Woolf 209). The enchanted lighthouse

he remembers from his youth is no less real than the one he sees in front of him:

“for nothing was simply one thing” (Woolf 209). Woolf’s words in the beginning

of Bechdel’s graphic memoir resonate with her complex process of revisiting and

re-picturing memories; in Bechdel’s world everything has multiple meanings.

Her two graphic memoirs, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomedy (2006) and Are You

My Mother? A Comic Drama (2012) continually execute the work of re-narrating

memories and persistently reconstruct the implications of her memories.

Through the comics medium, Bechdel seems to have found a space where her

story can be told. Gillian Whitlock observes the “potential of comics to open up

new and troubled spaces” in her article “Autographics: The Seeing “I” of

Comics” (976). Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is a text that carries out precisely this

work: it is a graphic memoir which opens up the unsettled issues of the comic’s

form itself, as well as sexuality, family dynamics, mourning, and the notion of a

single reality. By writing her memoirs in the medium of comics, Bechdel

challenges our notions of autobiography and non-fiction. She battles with deep

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psychological issues of her own queer sexuality alongside her father’s, of the

effects of growing up in emotional isolation, of how to mourn a father who

enjoyed sex with male high school students. As if this was not enough, Bechdel

also deals with essential questions of our own perceptions of reality and truth in

an autographic narrative filled with literary and graphic allusions. Her complex

narrative continues in Are You My Mother?. Her second graphic memoir sets out

to explore Alison’s relationship with her mother, and essentially with herself, in

an intriguing blend of psychology, literature and childhood memories. All of this

through the medium of comics, a medium “remarkably unconstrained by genre

expectations” (Chute and DeKoven “Comic books and graphic novels” 175).

Bechdel’s specific take on the graphic narrative involves a recursive

disjointed structure, a frequent re-visiting of traumatic memories, and words and

images that go in opposite directions. The graphic form is precisely what requires

readers to “read differently, to attend to disjunctions between the cartoon panel

and the verbal text, to disrupt the seeming forward motion of the cartoon

sequence and adopt a reflexive and recursive reading practice” (Watson 28). Fun

Home invites its readers to enter the recursive and incoherent pace of a

traumatised mind. By working on “the fringes of acceptability” (“The Alison

Bechdel Interview”), Bechdel reveals the true powers of comics to narrate the

unnarratable. Against a tradition of pronouncing traumatic experiences

unspeakable, unimaginable, unrepresentable, Fun Home and Are You My Mother?

directly challenge these beliefs. Chute highlights the importance of graphic

narrative’s ability to tell and show stories that couldn’t have been communicated

in any other way (Graphic Women 2). Bechdel’s work demonstrates an ability to

employ this specific quality of comics to effectively communicate the

unspeakable trauma. In an audio-visual interview with Chute about Are You My

Mother?, Bechdel explains how she couldn’t have told her story in any other form

than the comics medium: “I can’t explain. I can’t talk about it. The only way to

tell this story is through this lengthy exposition of pictures and words together”

(Chute “Audio-visual interview”). Bechdel’s words resonate with Laub’s account

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of the paradox of testimony, of the imperative to tell and the impossibility of

telling; “there are never enough words or the right words, there is never enough

time or the right time, and never enough listening or the right listening to

articulate the story that cannot be fully captured in thought, memory and speech”

(Testimony 78). While Bechdel´s words explicitly express the impossible task of

narrating traumatic experience, Fun Home and Are You My Mother? demonstrate

her ability to show and tell the unspeakable through a simultaneous

fragmentation and merging of distinctive temporalities, spaces, memories and

narratives.

This chapter will establish how Bechdel’s complex narrative structure in

Fun Home and Are You My Mother? mirrors the nature of traumatic memory;

demonstrate how the use of closure plays an essential role in creating a listener

for Alison’s testimony; examine her crisis of representation, and observe how she

employs intertextuality as a tool of interpretation of her testimony. By examining

the different aspects of traumatic experience in Bechdel’s work, this chapter will

demonstrate how Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are able to represent the

notion of unspeakable trauma, not only through fragmentation of the narrative,

of the self, and of temporality, but also through the spaces “in-between:” between

the visual and the verbal narratives, between what is told and what is shown.

Rather than regarding Fun Home and Are You My Mother? texts of dividing

“splits,” as several scholars have done before me (as exemplified by Julia

Watson’s “Autographic Disclosures and Genealogies of Desire in Alison

Bechdel’s “Fun Home”), I will demonstrate how they are founded on a

multiplicity of narratives, of narrative selves, and of temporalities.

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Part One: “The collapse of time, space and memory”

The temporal aspect of trauma is an essential feature of its complex definition as

a delayed response to an overwhelming experience, an event experienced “too

soon” (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 11). Caruth explains how it isn’t too little

access to a traumatic experience but the overwhelming immediacy of that

traumatic experience that produces its belated uncertainty (Trauma 6). In a similar

manner, Dori Laub writes that “trauma precludes its registration; the observing

and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out,

malfunction” (Testimony 57). Thus, traumatic experience essentially demands a

disruption of temporality and causality. As we have seen in chapter one, Caruth

emphasises the inability to fully witness the traumatic event as it occurs, the

collapse of its understanding, as the force of a traumatic experience (Trauma 7).

In a similar manner to Caruth, Laub writes:

The traumatic event, although real, took place outside the parameters of

“normal” reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time. The trauma

is thus an event that has no beginning, no ending, no before, no during

and no after. This absence of categories that define it lends it a quality of

“otherness,” a salience, a timelessness and a ubiquity that puts it outside

the range of associatively linked experiences, outside the range of

comprehension, of recounting and of mastery. (Testimony 69)

This complex quality of “otherness,” of an incoherent sense of time and space, of

an intricate relationship between temporality, memory and trauma surfaces in

Bechdel’s work. As Chute notes in her introduction to Graphic Women, images in

comics are by nature fragmented and thus present an excellent opportunity for

representing actual fragmented recollection, “a prominent feature of traumatic

memory” (4). The following will demonstrate how Bechdel employs the

grammar of comics, specifically its unique ability of collapsing time and space,

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to effectively depict her experience as “outside the parameters of “normal”

reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time” in Fun Home and Are You My

Mother? (Testimony 69).

The fundamentally fragmented structure of graphic narrative provides the

comics medium with suitable tools to effectively represent the fragmented nature

of traumatic memory. The comics medium’s ability to merge time and space is

described as one of its essential characteristics in McCloud’s Understanding

Comics: “In learning to read comics we all learned to perceive time spatially, for

in the world of comics, time and space are one and the same” (100). The content

of panels, number of panels, closure between panels and the shape off panels are

all different features that affect our experience of perceived time in graphic

narratives (McCloud 99 – 101). Similarly, Chute and DeKoven argue that graphic

narrative’s “fundamental syntactical operation is the representation of time as

space on the page” (“Introduction: Graphic Narrative” 769). Thus, the comics

medium provides its artists with infinite opportunity for depicting experiences

that don’t fit within the boundaries of “normal” reality. The characteristics of the

comics medium resonates with the description of trauma as an experience which

destroys the ordinary mechanisms of awareness and cognition and leaves the

object unable to recollect and integrate the event into normal consciousness (Leys

2). The comics medium shows a distinct ability to tell narratives that are outside

these ordinary mechanisms of consciousness. Although graphic narrative shows

this distinct possibility for narrating such stories, each artist must discover their

individual methods of how to narrate the unnarratable.

Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? demonstrate the perhaps

most notable feature of Bechdel’s work: her remarkably complex narrative

structure. Bechdel’s graphic memoirs reject the traditional linear progression of

the standard novel. On the contrary, both of them are constructed upon an

episodic, thematic and non-linear structure. Memories are re-examined, re-

drawn and re-presented throughout the graphic memoirs. Fun Home, in

particular, is built upon a repetitive narrative structure where certain memories

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are repeatedly re-presented. The moments that are repeated reveal their

significance through their repetition: Bruce’s moment of death and two specific

phone calls are frequently returned to throughout the graphic memoir: one

communicates her father’s queer sexuality, the other his death. Bechdel’s

insistence to depict these moments again and again, resonate with Caruth’s

observation about the frozen quality of traumatic memory: “To be traumatised is

precisely to be possessed by an image or event” (Trauma 4 – 5). These memories

stand out from what could initially be considered an overwhelming stream of

incoherent memories. Through their frequent recurrence, these memories

establish their position as traumatic memories. Bechdel provides her own

narrative voice as our guide in this sophisticated labyrinth of recursive

memories, literary references and an intricately structured life story. Chute

proposes that the recursive compulsion to continuously picture and re-picture

central traumatic events in Fun Home reflects, at the structural level, upon the

recursivity suggested by the comics page itself, “which, by virtue of its sequential

order of panels and its immediate visual “all-at-onceness,” often demands

rereading and relooking” (Graphic Women 183). Likewise, Julia Watson

emphasises how, in Fun Home, “its temporal sequence is punctuated by

introspective acts that cast back into the past in spirals of reflection; thus the

tendency of the page to impel us forward in reading the comic as a narrative

sequence is repeatedly disrupted, spatialized” (37). Accordingly, the flow of the

narrative is repeatedly interrupted, and consequently the readers are invited to

re-read, re-examine, and actively pay attention to the narration. While the

repetitive frozen quality of these memories establishes them as traumatic

memories, they also coincide with Bechdel’s constantly fragmented non-linear

narrative structure.

While Bechdel demonstrates her capacity to employ the grammar of

comics, specifically its simultaneous fragmentation and “all-at-onceness” to

mimic the fragmented nature of traumatic memory throughout her graphic

memoir, we will now have closer look at a section from Fun Home’s second

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chapter, “A Happy Death” (see figure 2.1). The chapter circles around the

narrator’s thoughts about Bruce’s life and the ambiguous conditions surrounding

his death. The top panels of the page are the last two of a series of panels

depicting a young Alison helping her father in the embalming room of the

Bechdel Funeral Home (see figure 2.1). Alison keeps her feelings concealed,

revealing no emotion. The next two panels take us across time and space to an

older Alison sitting at a restaurant with an acquaintance. She seems to have

excelled so much in supressing her emotions that she cannot access them at all

any more: “For years after my father’s death, when the subject of parents came

up in conversation I would relate the information in a flat, matter-of-fact

tone…eager to detect in my listener the flinch of grief that eluded me” (see figure

2.1). The bottom right panel takes us to a different time and space; to the phone

call revealing the death of her father (see figure 2.1). This page reflects a

fragmentary non-linearity similar to Gloeckner´s structure of “Fun Things To Do

With Little Girls.” By presenting her memories in a jumbled unchronological

order, Bechdel is mirroring Felman’s affirmation that testimony cannot offer a

completed statement of the traumatic events (Testimony 5). Rather, Bechdel’s non-

linear structure repeats Anne Whitehead’s notion that “trauma carries the force

of a literality which renders it resistant to narrative structures and linear

temporalities” (5). This story is the kind of story that cannot be told except in a

unique space of its own, a space unaffected by conventional chronological

narrative and logical sequence. Bechdel emphasises the inherent disjuncture

between words and images in the form of the graphic narrative: “I love comics

because of that built-in disjunction between the words and the pictures, even

when they’re explicitly complementary and illustrating one another. I like

pushing that space and being able to have two or three ideas going at once.”

(Terzian “Family Matters”). The page from “A Happy Death” excellently

illustrates Bechdel’s fondness for pushing this in-built disjunction between words

and pictures in graphic narratives and of pushing multiple ideas at once. In this

case the narrator combines a childhood memory of being in the embalming room

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Figure 2.1 (Fun Home 45)

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with her father, firstly, with a memory of telling someone about her father’s

suicide, and secondly, with a memory of how she herself received the news of

her father’s death. The different memories are entwined into a larger narrative

that depicts Alison’s difficulties with expressing emotions. Time and space are

merged into a space “outside of the parameters of normal reality” (Felman,

Testimony 69). The page from “A Happy Death” shows how causality, sequence,

place and time no longer obey the rules of normal reality. The discussion of

Gloeckner’s “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls,” observed that two of the

panels were inserted into the narrative before the event that they were

remembered by took place. Similarly, Bechdel depicts Alison at the restaurant

relating the death of her father, before depicting the phone call she received herself

(see figure 2.1). Gloeckner and Bechdel’s merging of time and space, their

disruption of causality and sequence, creates a new space, a space where there is

“no beginning, no ending, no before, no during and no after” (Felman Testimony

69). Such fragmented stories that rejects the rules of normal reality demand

specific narrative tools in order to create any narrative meaning.

The previous chapter established how the repeated visual and verbal

references to alcohol and domestic abuse create a narrative thread in “Fun Things

To Do With Little Girls.” The page from “A Happy Death” demonstrates a similar

ability to create narrative meaning from apparent chaos. The narrative voice,

detached from the painful events, acts as a guide, tying the narrative together by

continually speaking of Alison’s inherited talent for hiding her emotions both

from herself and from others. The verbal guide is a necessity in Alison’s reality,

created beyond the traditional limits of time, space, and causality. Alison’s face

also works as a verbal narrative of its own throughout the page, depicting the

continuity of her repressed feelings. With Groensteen’s concept of general

arthrology in mind, as it was explained in the previous chapter, it becomes clear

how the repeated blank face of Alison helps the readers create narrative meaning.

Not only does her blank facial expression create meaning in this specific page,

but throughout the whole of Fun Home. Alison is continually depicted as quiet

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and emotionless, reflecting upon her family of isolated people who are

disconnected from each other.

The aftermath of growing up in this family of lonely individuals is one of

the main issues depicted in Are You My Mother?. Chapter three “True and False

Self,” provides us with another striking example of how Bechdel employs the

grammar of comics to mirror the fragmented nature of traumatic memory. The

chapter engages with theory from Donald Winnicott’s True and False Self to

investigate Alison’s complicated relationship with her mother. The specific page

of interest occurs within a section where Alison is telling her mother that she is

considering to schedule an appointment with a therapist, only to be surprised to

learn that both her mother and her grandmother also suffered from depressions.

The page depicts three generations of women, Alison, her mother, and her

grandmother, each struggling alone with their own depression (see figure 2.2).

The page not only merges different moments in time into the space of their local

church, but also unites memory with fantasy. The top left imagined memory of

Alison’s grandmother in church is juxtaposed almost seamlessly with what could

be Alison’s actual recollection of being in church with her own mother to the

right. The slightly paler colours used to depict the imagined moment to the left

are the only indication of a difference between the two panels. Similarly to the

second page of “Hommage à Duchamp” (see figure 1.7), there is no dialogue and

no motion lines which generates a strong sense of timelessness to the page, the

moments seem almost out of time in due to the absurd similarities and

differences between them. Felman’s notion of “a quality of “otherness,” a

salience, a timelessness and a ubiquity that puts it outside the range of

associatively linked experiences” certainly resonates with the page from “True

and False Self” (Testimony 69). The examples from Fun Home and Are You My

Mother? effectively materialise the process of transforming experience, through

fragmented memory, into an incoherent narrative. The non-conventional

perception of time which we have seen in Bechdel’s work is typically emphasised

with regards to traumatic experience.

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Figure 2.2 (Are You My Mother? 99)

65

Trauma, as a non-experience at the time of its reception, demands a disruption

of time. Chute and DeKoven observe how Bechdel’s work presents the procedure

and the object of memory, “through its composition, through its layers of verbal

and visual narrations” (“Comic books and graphic novels” 191). In its very

structure, Bechdel’s graphic memoirs express this disjointed, non-sequential

sense of time, thus creating narratives that accurately depict the complex link

between temporality, memory and trauma. By crafting her graphic narratives

upon such a complex structure, Bechdel tests her readers’ ability to connect the

gaps in her narrative. The reader seems to play an important role in creating

meaning of Bechdel’s complex narrative. The following will further explore the

role of the reader in Bechdel’s testimonial narrative.

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Part Two: “Listening to Alison’s testimony”

Jared Gardner observes how graphic narratives open up (inevitably and

necessarily) a space for the reader to pause, between the panels, and make

meaning out of what she sees and reads, thereby serving as collaborative texts

between the imagination of the author/artist and the imagination of the reader

who must complete the narrative (Gardner 791; 800). The comics page, structured

around panels and gutters, presents readers with an opportunity to pause, re-

read, and recreate meaning in a co-dependent relationship with the artist.

McCloud defines comics as “juxtaposed pictoral and other images in deliberate

sequence” (9). While such a definition stresses a controlled and deliberate

narrative structure, the readers are also obliged to participate in the immense

work of creating connections between the fragmented panels in order to create

meaning. To use McCloud’s own words “no other art form gives so much to its

audience while asking so much from them as well” (92). The reader must

participate in the process of closure; “the phenomenon of observing the parts but

perceiving the whole” so that meaning can arise (63). The reader’s compulsory

responsibility of constructing connections between panels, of creating a

sequential meaning, places the medium of the graphic narrative in a unique

position with regards to involving the reader in the process of creation. The limbo

of the gutter, the blank spaces between panels, is essential for the process of

closure. It’s the space where “human imagination takes two separate images and

transforms them into a single idea” (McCloud 98). Whitlock describes the

meaning that is created in the gutter as “a meaning produced in an active process

of imaginative production whereby the reader shuttles between words and

images, and navigates across gutters and frames, being moved to see, feel, or

think differently in the effort of producing narrative closure” (978). Thus, closure

is on all levels a dynamic process that encourages the readers to see, feel, and

think both actively and differently.

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As the previous chapter demonstrated, through Gloeckner’s challenging

drawings of characters who transcend the page and make eye contact with the

readers, reader involvement is an essential feature within the act of testimony.

Laub explains how the act of bearing witness to trauma is never a monologue, it

is a process that includes the listener, and “for the testimonial process to take

place, there needs to be a bonding, the intimate and total presence of an other”

(70). While Laub’s work specifically focuses upon the interviewer’s role in

listening to the testimonies of Holocaust survivors, I believe that his work also

sheds light upon the reader’s role, as a listener of testimony, in reading

autobiography marked by traumatic experience. This section will demonstrate

how Bechdel’s work relies heavily on the process of closure and reader

participation to create narrative meaning and thus to create a witness to the

testimony of a traumatic childhood.

Through an extraordinary high degree of closure, Bechdel strongly

involves her readers and establishes her work as testimonial narrative. This

“phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole” fundamentally

marks her graphic memoirs. The readers become actively engaged in the

narratives by creating meaning between panel to panel, between word and image

and by closely interpreting a continuous range of intertextual references and

visual symbols. Accordingly, she invites her readers to become active listeners of

testimony. As was established in the previous section, Bechdel’s work is marked

by a controlled fragmented, non-linear and recursive narrative structure. For

Bechdel, closure becomes a necessary tool in “filling the gaps” of her story which

in its very narrative structure mimics the nature of traumatic recollection. Thus,

panel transitions are essential in creating the decidedly complex narrative

structure that constitutes Fun Home and Are You My Mother?.

In a post on his blog Parabasis, Isac Butler displays an estimated overview

of the panel transitions in Fun Home. His work is interesting as it explicitly reveals

the great amount of closure required in Fun Home. Butler’s analysis is based upon

McCloud’s work on panel transitions which establishes that most Western

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comics artists follow the same transition pattern: a high degree of action-to-action

transitions, with a much smaller degree of subject-to-subject, scene-to-scene, and

aspect-to-aspect (74). This pattern was discovered in the material of a wide range

of both ground-breaking and mainstream artists such as Will Eisner, Art

Spiegelman, and Carl Barks (McCloud 75 – 76). Butler’s analysis, however,

reveals that the panel transitions in Fun Home differs from the norm. Rather than

having a high degree of action-to-action transitions, Bechdel’s graphic narrative

shows an elevated degree of scene-to-scene transitions. According to his analysis,

approximately 59% of all transitions in Fun Home are scene-to-scene transitions

(Butler). McCloud describes scene-to-scene transitions as transitions that often

require “deductive reasoning,” as they transport us “across significant distances

of time and space” (71). Thus, these panel transitions can easily appear

incoherent and fragmented, mimicking the cognitive processes behind a

testimony of trauma. Butler’s analysis does not investigate the reasons why

Bechdel’s work differs so much from that of many other artists. Nevertheless, I

will suggest that by forcing the reader to become actively involved in creating

meaning from panel to panel, from one memory to another, Bechdel establishes

her work as testimonial, thus requiring an active listener. The author herself has

expressed concern that “those connections were not going to happen. Even now

I’ll pick it up and start reading and it seems like a series of non sequiturs. But my

hope is that somehow these different strands cohere” (Terzian “Family Matters”).

Are You My Mother? shows the same tendency of a high degree of scene-to-scene

transitions, as illustrated in figure 2.3. The previous pages recount Alison’s

trouble with sleeping and her nightly walks to gaze at her therapist’s home, while

the page from figure 2.3 suddenly shifts to a panel which displays a highlighted

quote about transitional objects from Donald Winnicott’s paper “Transitional

Objects and Transitional Phenomena.” Next follows a panel of an adult Alison

looking at her old teddy-bear and a panel dedicated to the observation that “The

similarity of “beezum” to “bosom” is perhaps notable” (see figure 2.3). The two

next panels depict Helen breastfeeding a new-born Alison, to the objections and

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Figure 2.3 (Are You My Mother? 59)

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entertainment of the people around her (see figure 2.3). It is not an easy story to

navigate and the reader must pay close attention in order to follow the narrator’s

line of reasoning. The panels abruptly shift in time, space, and subject thus the

readers must listen carefully to notice how the narrator employs Winnicott’s

quote to interpret the nicknames Alison and her girlfriend Eloise use for each

other: “Beeze” and “Beezum,” and how Helen’s unsuccessful attempt at

breastfeeding might carry a deeper meaning for Helen and Alison’s future

relationship.

In addition to creating meaning between panels, the reader must also

understand the reserved narrator’s comments; a process which seems to, at times,

require just as much imagination and deductive work as the act of closure in the

gutters between Bechdel’s panels. McCloud separates between seven distinct

categories of word and picture combinations: word specific, picture specific, duo-

specific, additive, parallel, inter-dependent combinations and montage (153 –

155). In Bechdel’s work most of her picture – word combinations are either

parallel or inter-dependent, demanding an overall high degree of reader

involvement to connect word and image. In this fragmented testimony, the

narrative voice acts as our guide in the ever-changing visual landscape of

memories. However, the correspondence between word and image more often

than not demands a large amount of deductive work from the reader. When the

narrator spends approximately one and a half pages describing Daedalus’ role in

the creation of a minotaur, “a half-bull, half-man monster” who is hidden in a

labyrinth, it is up to the reader to create the link between the myth and the

associated images that depict Bruce beating one of Alison’s brothers and the

resulting consequences (see figure 2.4). This example clearly belongs to the

category of a parallel combination of word and image. The narrator tells one

continuous story, the images another. The reader becomes (to use McCloud’s

terminology) an accomplice in the narrative, in order for the narrative to reach its

communicative purpose, the reader must collaborate in Bechdel’s story telling.

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Figure 2.4 (Fun Home 12)

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Bechdel also employs numerous visual indicators of testimony. Whereas

Gloeckner draws characters who make eye contact and demand the readers to

actively acknowledge their experience, ultimately, Minnie’s experience,

Bechdel’s work show a different visual approach to achieving the same goal. The

reader’s role as an active listener of testimony and as a spectator of Bechdel’s

graphic memoirs is emphasised not only through her high degree of closure, but

also through repeated depictions hands and cameras in Fun Home and Are You

My Mother?. Bechdel redraws photographs from the family album on several

occasions throughout Fun Home and Are You My Mother?. Several of the redrawn

photographs are placed in the fourth chapter of Fun Home, “In the Shadow of

Young Girls in Flower. 9 ” The double page panel that depicts an intimate

photograph of an undressed Roy is deliberately placed on page 100 in Fun Home

and has received much academic attention, especially due to how the image

distinguishes itself from the rest of the graphic memoir with a larger-than-life

sized hand holding the photograph, echoing the hand of the reader holding the

book, and the page also presents Fun Home´s only record of a bleed (McCloud´s

vocabulary). However, I would like to focus upon a slightly different aspect of

Bechdel’s panels that echo her readers.

Bechdel has spoken about her unusual method for creating her graphic

memoirs on numerous occasions over the years. She describes her work process

as a process that importantly involves “posing for all the characters in the book”

(Terzian “Family Matters”). The artist recreates her memories by posing as the

character, taking a photo of the re-enacted memory via self-timer, and then

working with the photography as her model for redrawing the scene. This

peculiar working method enables her to physically recreate her memories, a

process that enables her to literally embody the different people of her life.

Bechdel explicitly draws attention to the creative process behind her graphic

memoirs in Are You My Mother?. In a section of “Mirror” Alison and her mother

9 Examples of panels which focuses upon hands are found on the following pages of Fun Home: 77, 100, 102, 120, 156, 205.

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are arguing on the phone. Alison finally understands that “whatever it was [she]

wanted from [her] mother was simply not there to be had” (Are You My Mother?

228), and hangs up the phone. A large panel depicts Alison crying in a foetal

position, a panel which is reminiscent of previous depictions from Fun Home (see

figure 2.4). A couple of pages later, the same memory is returned to again, but this

time with a different agenda in mind. As is shown in figure 2.5, the left panel

shows a smaller version of the previously discussed panel, whilst the right panel

takes a step back, revealing the camera. The readers immediately re-picture the

previous panel in their mind, now they see the author posing for the camera,

rather than a character in pain. The difference between the two is highlighted by

also emphasising how the two also wear different clothes.

Figure 2.5 (Are You My Mother? 229)

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Figure 2.6 (Are You My Mother? 233)

By including her working process directly into the graphic narrative, Bechdel is

reminding her audience that they are active listeners of her testimony. It becomes

a metanarrative, somehow the Alison that is drawn in the panel from figure 2.4 is

different from the Alison from the panel of figure 2.5. Not only does she remind

them of their position as listeners, but she also participates in the testimony of

other´s through her special working method. By embodying not only her own

character, but all of them, Bechdel is essentially not only asking someone to listen

to her testimony, but also becoming a listener herself of the testimony of other’s.

In positioning herself as her father, embodying his experience, she ultimately

takes upon herself to simultaneously be a witness and a listener of his story, his

narrative that otherwise could not be heard. Bruce Bechdel’s life and death is

literally and figuratively an event without a witness. Caruth emphasises that

testimony can only take place through the listening of another, and Bechdel takes

this job upon herself (Trauma 11).

Bechdel´s particular use of closure, benefits from the strong link between

author and reader, speaker and listener, in order to create her testimonial

narrative. Laub accentuates this imperative to tell and “to articulate the story that

cannot be fully captured in thought, memory and speech” (78). The two authors’

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need to create more than one graphic memoir indicates their imperative to tell

their narratives. Laub notes that “it is essential for this narrative that could not be

articulated, to be told, to be transmitted, to be heard” (his emphasis, 85). This notion

of a narrative that could not be articulated, could not be voiced, will be further

examined in the next section that centres on Alison’s crisis of representation.

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Part Three: “A crisis of representation”

In Chute’s introduction to Graphic Women, she emphasises the important role of

the comics medium to proclaim the value of presence, however complex and

contingent, against a common valorisation of absence and aporia in the face of

trauma: “The force and value of graphic narrative’s intervention, on the whole,

attaches to how it pushes on conceptions of the unrepresentable that have

become commonplace in the wake of deconstruction, especially in contemporary

discourse about trauma” (2). She rightly considers the graphic medium´s ability

to challenge the common conception that trauma is unspeakable and

unrepresentable to be its most important feature. I want to return to Caruth’s

accurate observation about traumatic experience as an experience in which “the

inability fully to witness the event as it occurs, or the ability to witness the event

fully” can only occur at the cost of witnessing oneself (Trauma 7). Caruth, together

with scholars such as Laub and Felman, recognises that the force of the traumatic

experience arises precisely “in the collapse of its understanding,” at the expense

of simple knowledge and memory (7). Chute’s introduction continues to suggest

that the dominant tropes of unspeakability, invisibility, and inaudibility that

have tended to characterise trauma theory needs to be reconsidered (Graphic

Women 3). The essential question here seems to be whether Chute’s claim that the

form of the graphic narrative challenges the unrepresentability of trauma, and

Caruth’s notion that traumatic experience arises precisely in the collapse of its

understanding, are compatible? This section will demonstrate how Bechdel

employs the visual and verbal tensions of comics to truthfully represent a crisis

of language and a crisis of representation in the face of trauma. Ultimately, by

replacing absence with presence, by representing a crisis of language and a crisis

of representation, Bechdel challenges the notion that traumatic experience is

unspeakable, indistinguishable, and unrepresentable.

In the fifth chapter of Fun Home, “The Canary Colored Caravan of Death,”

Alison describes what she refers to as “an epistemological crisis” that she went

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through when she began writing a diary at the age of ten: her narrative voice

declares: “It was sort of an epistemological crisis. How did I know that the things

I was writing were absolutely, objectively true?” (Fun Home 141). She is beginning

to sense the vagueness and ambiguity of language, in turn, making her question

her own perceptions: “My simple declarative sentences began to strike me as

hubristic at best, utter lies at worst. All I could speak for was my own perceptions,

and perhaps not even those” (Fun Home 141). To acknowledge this doubt that she

feels towards her own remarks, she begins writing “I think” in between her

observations of daily life in Beech Creek. The narrative voice explains how these

“I thinks were gossamer sutures in that gaping rift between signifier and

signified” (Fun Home 142). In her realisation that words cannot be trusted, she

turns to the visual for comfort. Gradually, in order to save time and keep evil

away from her subjects, the “I thinks” turn into a “shorthand version,” a symbol

that Bechdel describes as a “curvy circumflex” (see figure 2.7). This symbol

becomes the visual double of the verbal “I think,” a symbol which she draws at

the end of her sentences, next, over certain words, and finally, across whole

pages. Alison has established that words are unstable, so she protects herself and

the people she loves with a visual symbol (Chute 189).

Figure 2.7 (Fun Home 142 – 143)

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Alison makes references to this childhood phase of OCD and her “tendency to

edit [her] thoughts before they even took shape” in chapter two of Are You My

Mother? (49). Whilst the curvy circumflex symbol seems to be a symbol of

protection from the instability of language in Fun Home, a quote from Freud’s

Psychopathology of Everyday Life presents Alison with a whole new explanation for

her compulsive behaviour:

“Nervous persons afflicted with compulsive thinking and compulsive

states, who are often very intelligent, show very plainly that superstition

originates from repressed hostile and cruel impulses. The greater part of

superstition signifies fear of impending evil, and he who has frequently

wished evil to others, but because of a good bringing up, has repressed the

same into the unconscious, will be particularly apt to expect punishment

for such unconscious evil in the form of a misfortune threatening him from

without.” (Freud, qtd. in Are You My Mother? 50)

With Freud’s notion that superstition and compulsive behaviour originate from

repressed hostility in mind, Alison’s obsessive journal entries not only suggest

repressed hostility towards her father, but perhaps more importantly towards

herself: “By far the most heavily obliterated word is “I”” (Are You My Mother?

49). Although the penultimate page of the chapter depicts Alison on her way to

recovery from her compulsive behaviour, with the recursive pace of Bechdel’s

narrative structure, the final panels depict an earlier memory of Alison dictating

her diary to her mother, firmly anchored in her OCD. Seemingly, by giving up

her penmanship to her mother, Alison’s crisis is overcome to some extent, and

yet, as Yaël Schlick notes in “Selves and Texts in the Autobiographies of Alison

Bechdel and Lynda Barry,” Fun Home itself is continually marked by the same

haunting question of the adequacy of writing to represent reality, “as the

narrative questions its own assertions and tests its affinities against some truths

potentially diverging from them” (30). The last page of the fifth chapter shows

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Alison dictating her diary entries to her mother, too overwhelmed by her

compulsive writing scheme to write them herself, a clear indication of the

persisting continuity of her tense and neurotic relationship with writing. In this

sense, Alison’s crisis of language in effect becomes an echo of the overall crisis of

Fun Home: to create a complete map of “life’s attendant chaos,” closing the gap

between signifier and signified, between word and meaning, while knowing that

this is an impossible task (Fun Home 149).

Although Alison’s epistemological crisis and scepticism towards words´

ability to objectively depict reality is explicitly described and discussed in the

graphic memoir, there is another crisis which is perhaps more hidden; Alison´s

crisis of representation. As we have seen throughout this chapter, while Alison´s

childhood is ultimately a combination of several complex issues, the narrator

establishes her father´s sexuality and the possible causal relationship between

her own sexuality and his unexpected death, to be the core of Alison´s pain. I

would like to suggest that both Fun Home and Are You My Mother? imply that the

absence of emotions and the inability to express emotions is both the core of

Alison´s trauma and a strong symptom of it. The unsettling absence of emotions

is present throughout both graphic memoirs, but perhaps mostly so in the face of

death. Chute describes Fun Home as a “profoundly bodily book” but in a much

different way than we have seen in Gloeckner’s work (Graphic Women 195).

Bechdel’s sexually involved bodies are “earnest and sweet” in comparison to

Gloeckner’s sexually engaged and engorged bodies “that leap confrontationally

off the page” with eyes that demand to be seen (Chute, Graphic Women 195).

Chute rightly claims that Fun Home’s “most shocking bodies are dead” (Graphic

Women 195). In the face of death, loss, and grief, Fun Home’s true crisis of

representation arises.

The second chapter, “A Happy Death,” focuses largely on the life and

death of Bruce, specifically describing everyday life in the Bechdel Funeral

Home. This chapter contains several of Fun Home’s dead bodies: Firstly, Alison is

shown at age three, next to her dead grandfather, asking to be held closer. At this

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age, curiosity and interest in what she doesn’t understand seems to be the only

emotion expressed. The vast contrast between this episode and the following

portrayal of Alison facing a dead body is obvious. The next occasion is depicted

only a couple of pages later, but years have passed in Alison’s life: Alison is asked

to assist Bruce in the embalming process of a deceased man, an event out of the

ordinary in the Bechdel Funeral Home. This moment is interesting because it sets

the stage for Alison’s subsequent encounters with death. The first panel

completely conceals Alison’s immediate reaction to the dead body on the

embalming table. Her presence is nothing but a silhouette, hiding any reaction or

emotion (see figure 2.8). In a similar manner to how the reader follows Minnie’s

gaze towards Pascal’s erect penis in Gloeckner’s “Hommage à Duchamp,” (see

figure 1.9) the reader here also follows the gaze of the protagonist. In this case,

the object of our gaze is the deceased man on the operation table, an upsetting

sight for the average reader. However, the narrative voice calmly explains how

“the strange pile of his genitals was shocking but what really got my attention

was his chest, split open to a dark red cave” (see figure 2.8). Several scholars have

paid attention to the narrator’s description of “the dark red cave” as the ultimate

gap in the narrative rather than the uncovered penis, in contrast to Gloeckner’s

“Hommage à Duchamp,” where the exposed erect penis is the disturbing focus

of attention (see figure 1.9). Chute asserts that “the absence at the center of the

body – its gapingness – is what shocks” (Graphic Women 198). However, I would

suggest that Alison’s pitch-black silhouette is in fact more gaping than the man’s

chest. The nothingness of the black silhouette creates a vacuum, a gap; in contrast

to the dark red cave which shows the contours of intestines and the inside of the

man’s rib cage, there is literally nothing there. The visual image is certainly

shocking, but if the open chest is the source of trauma for this particular memory,

as the narrator claims, then the black silhouette shows its effect on the young girl.

The absence of the silhouette contradicts the presence of the dark red cave.

The third panel exposes Alison’s face, but, as the narrator explicitly relates,

she, like her father, whose face is hidden beneath his facial mask, “studiously

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Figure 2.8 (Fun Home 44)

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betrayed no emotion” (Fun Home 44). Alison’s facial expression remains

alarmingly unaffected throughout the whole scene. Furthermore, as we have

seen in a previous section, the subsequent page also depicts the same emotionless

facial expression on a grown-up Alison. Not only does she hide her emotions

from her father, but also from her readers. Rather than verbally describing her

feelings about the exposed, deceased man, the narrative voice focuses upon

Bruce’s motives for asking her to be present at this specific embalming process.

While the traditional Western graphic narrative is read from left to right

horizontally, the layout of this page also suggests a possible vertical structure,

reminiscent of the structure we saw in Gloeckner’s “Fun Things To Do With Little

Girls:” the presence of the open chest, with its exposed ribs and intestines

(ultimately repeated in the poster on the wall in the bottom panel) continually

keep to the left, while depictions of Alison are kept to the right. One side shows

Alison’s act of looking, the other depicts the object of her gaze. Like the poster

echoes the shocking presence of exposed intestines on the left-hand side, Alison’s

t-shirt echoes the absence of her silhouette on the right-hand side. The layout of

the page creates a rhythm of absence and presence, resonating with the tensions

of the comics page, and thus, with Caruth’s notion of “knowing and not

knowing” (Unclaimed Experience 3). Bechdel clearly links this memory from the

embalming room with her father’s impending death, as indicated by the insertion

of the panel depicting the phone call that revealed his death on the very next

page. Likewise, Chute notes how the thread Bruce is pulling through the

deceased man’s chest essentially links the two men literally and figuratively

(Graphic Women 197).

The actual depiction of Alison’s physical encounter with Bruce’s death

occurs a couple of pages later. The top panels depict Alison, with her back

towards us, looking at her dead father in the casket. Her face is completely

hidden, as it was in her encounter with the deceased man from figure 2.8. The

narrative voice is not able to express any emotions, except Alison’s doubt that it

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Figure 2.9 (Fun Home 52)

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actually is her father lying in the casket in front of her. The panel is split in two,

splitting not only Bruce’s body but also Alison’s with the infinite limbo of the

gutter (see figure 2.9). The left panel expresses disbelief and unrecognizability,

whilst the right panel comes to the conclusion that the body has the same ink

tattoo that Bruce has. Noticeably, both Alison’s encounter with the deceased

bearded man and with her own father resonates with the impossibility of looking

and the impossibility of not looking, a paradox which Laub examines in his “An

Event Without a Witness” (75 – 92). The left panel exposes the faces of Alison and

her brothers as they look at their dead father, only to show that they aren’t really

looking. While they stand side by side next to the body of their deceased father,

their eyes are visibly turned away, not looking. But as she leaves the room, Alison

cannot help but turn around and look. This action is the visual representation of

Laub´s paradox, of the “imperative to tell” (78) and “the impossibility of telling”

(79); of the impossibility of looking and of not looking. The characters remain

silent for the entire page, expressing nothing, the only words present are the

words of the narrator: “The sole emotion I could muster was irritation when the

pinch-funeral director laid his hand on my arm consolingly” (see figure 2.9).

Alison´s hard struggle in the face of death culminates into a panel towards

the end of the fifth chapter, “The Canary Colored Caravan of Death” (a chapter

title which in itself indicates the graphic memoir’s preoccupation with death).

Bechdel refers to this chapter as her “cartooning manifesto,” suggesting its

overall importance (“The Alison Bechdel Interview”). The chapter contains

material depicting a whole range of issues such as the emotional isolation caused

by creative solitude in the Bechdel family, Bruce and Alison’s conflicting artistic

views, Alison’s compulsive issues and numerous maps that in the narrator’s own

words became a “mystical bridging of the symbolic and the real, of the label and

the thing itself” (Fun Home 147). Apparently, Alison finds a space where the gap

between the signifier and the signified is filled in the map from the Wind in the

Willows colouring book. Chute links Bechdel’s maps with McCloud’s notion of

comics as a procedure of mapping: mapping time into space (McCloud qtd. in

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Chute 191). Thus, the medium of the graphic narrative seems to be a space where

the endless gap between the label and the thing itself can be resolved. However,

the very next page after the panels with maps from Wind in the Willows contains

a panel that simultaneously challenges this idea and presents Alison’s significant

crisis of representation. The page consists of only two large panels, dividing the

page equally between them: the top panel depicts Alison and her brothers

looking at their cousin who died in a car crash; the bottom panel shows a

reproduction of Alison’s diary describing the event (see figure 2.10). The dead boy

mirrors Alison; he is a distant cousin “exactly [her] age” (Fun Home 147). Bruce is

lifting the sheet, revealing the dead boy, while his three children look. Bruce’s

unaffected face is the only complete face we see. Alison and her youngest

brothers are positioned with their backs towards the readers, keeping their

reactions hidden. In a similar manner to the description of the previous

embalming scene, the narrative voice blocks any references to subjective

emotions and focuses solely upon accurately describing the details of the dead

body: “His skin was gray, which gave his bright blond crewcut the effect of

yellow tint on a black- and-white photograph” (see figure 2.10). The narrator

subtly hints at the penetrating impression the episode has made upon the young

Alison by describing the diary entries of that weekend as “almost completely

obscured” (see figure 2.10). The diary reports: “We watched cartoons. Dad

showed us the dead people. They were cut up and stuff. Mother took us to a

party” (see figure 2.10). The narrative voice who throughout the graphic memoir

has worked as an interpretative guide remains disturbingly quiet about the

event. The next page quickly moves on to narrate Alison’s “recovery” from her

compulsive behaviour and her feelings regarding her dead cousin remain

unspoken. The page demonstrates, quite literally, the failure of both verbal and

visual language in the face of death. As Chute notes, the shape of the sheet that

Bruce holds up is reminiscent of the shape of the curvy circumflex etched across

Alison’s diary entries (Graphic Women 193). Consequently, if the symbol of the

curvy circumflex suggests Alison’s suspicion of language’s ability to depict an

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Figure 2.10 (Fun Home 148)

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objective truth, by integrating the same shape into her panel, Bechdel seems to

suggest a distrust of the image’s ability to represent reality. Importantly, the

narrator does not explicitly recognise the verbal or the visual repression of

Alison’s feelings in this scene. Thus, the scene from figure 2.10 emphasises its

clear contrast from the embalming room scene from chapter two (see figure 2.9),

in which the narrator openly acknowledges that Alison is repressing her feelings.

Is the narrator unaware of the absence of feelings at this moment or is it too

painful to even suggest that there is an absence?

Figure 2.11 (Are You My Mother? 282)

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Towards the end of Are You My Mother?, Bechdel depicts another

encounter with death, this time as an adult. After having finished writing Fun

Home, Alison intends to send a copy of the book to her former therapist, Jocelyn,

only to discover that she passed away from a rapid-growing cancer ten months

earlier. Alison writes in her diary how she wanted Jocelyn to be her mother after

spending only two hours with her (Are You My Mother? 51), indicating the strong

relationship she immediately felt with her therapist. The panel that depicts

Alison after having received the news of Jocelyn´s death is a large panel, taking

up three quarters of the page (see figure 2.11). Alison is in her office, staring at the

computer screen that has delivered the bad news. She is surrounded by the

narrative voice, filling a total of seven white boxes. The white boxes that

surround her are in this panel reminiscent of thought bubbles and perhaps

suggest that Alison had a lot on her mind at this point. However, none of them

reveal what Alison felt about Jocelyn´s death. After years of therapy, Alison still

can’t allow her emotions to reach the surface, neither verbally nor visually. Her

face, while visible, reveals nothing. By inserting this panel at the very end of Are

You My Mother?, a moment that essentially expresses Alison´s on-going struggle

with expressing her emotions, both verbally and visually, Bechdel makes clear

that the crisis of language and the crisis of representation are both continuous

struggles in her life. By representing her crisis of language and her crisis of

representation, Bechdel is ultimately able to represent the unspeakable of

trauma. The next section will continue the work of examining how Bechdel´s

work ultimately destabilises the concept of a single reality, of a tangible self, and

of the artist’s way towards autonomy.

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Part Four: “An intertextual mise-en-abîme”

In Trauma Fiction, Anne Whitehead highlights repetition, a dispersed or

fragmented narrative voice, and intertextuality as key stylistic features that tend

to occur in trauma narratives (84). These kinds of stylistic features interrupt the

text, by creating gaps and making new connections, as they intrude upon the

narrative, “mirror[ing] at a formal level the effects of trauma” (Whitehead 84).

The following will examine how Bechdel employs intertextuality as a key feature

in her work and the effects of her frequent intertextual comparisons. Ken Parille

describes how “autobiography is a record of life once removed from life itself;”

it is an objective experience that is filtered through the author’s subjectivity (“Six

Observations about Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?”). However,

Bechdel’s graphic memoirs do not openly reflect upon this idea of filtering an

objective experience through the writer’s subjectivity. Both Fun Home and Are

You My Mother? are extremely personal life narratives. However, as was

established in the previous section, Bechdel rarely reveals her personal feelings

about the events she describes. Instead, she structures her work around

intertextual references of different kinds. Rather than filtering her experiences

through her subjectivity, Bechdel employs other texts as tools of interpretation of

her trauma. Whitehead explains how “the intertextual novelist can enact through

a return to the source text an attempt to grasp what was not fully known or

realised in the first instance, and thereby to depart from it or pass beyond it” (90).

Noticeably, her words resonate with Caruth’s remarks that the inability to fully

witness the event as it occurs seems to be something that inhabits all traumatic

experience (Trauma 7). Through intertextuality, an opportunity to understand

that which “cannot be constructed as knowledge nor assimilated into full

cognition” arises (Felman and Laub 5). With Whitehead’s words in mind,

Bechdel’s persistent use of other texts as framework for her own narratives might

indicate that the intertextual elements of her text are employed with a kind of

therapeutic purpose in mind. However, as the following will demonstrate,

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Bechdel’s use of intertextuality in Fun Home and Are You My Mother? also

indicates an urge to interpret and re-interpret with the deconstruction rather than

re-affirmation as a result.

In Are You My Mother? Bechdel explicitly employs the work of different

psychoanalysts such as Freud and Winnicott to shed light on her understanding

of herself and her relationship with her mother. Likewise, Fun Home’s chapters

are each structured around a main text and a main writer, in addition to a

continuous stream of other more or less significant references to a range of

authors and texts. The overwhelming range of intertextual references range from

ancient myths from the old Greece, to lesbian literature, and modernist writers

such as James Joyce, Albert Camus and F. Scott Fitzgerald, has gained the

attention of numerous scholars such as Ariela Freedman10 and Ann Cvetkovich11.

However, I agree to Schlick´s affirmation that “the use of intertextuality [in Fun

Home] must be read into and against the text´s own signalling of the foundational

aporia between language and the real, explored so compellingly in the fifth

chapter” (34). While Bechdel’s continual comparison between her father’s life

and numerous authors or fictional characters seems like a way to firmly control

and to make sense of his life and his death, the actual effect of this work is not

affirmation but deconstruction. In fact, by continually drawing parallels between

an actual life and fictional characters or the lives of deceased authors, Bechdel’s

memoir is destabilised. A significant number of panels make either explicit or

implicit references to various kinds of literature. This stream of titles and covers

that hover in the background of Bechdel’s narratives have a peculiar effect of

suggesting that her story has already been told by another author, in another life.

10 Freedman, Ariela. “Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.”

Journal of Modern Literature, vol. 32, no. 4, (2009): 125 – 140. JSTOR,

http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.32.4.125. Accessed 6th of May 2017.

11 Cvetkovich, Ann. “Drawing the Archive in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” WSQ:

Women’s Studies Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 1&2 (2008): 111 – 128. Project Muse,

doi:10.1353/wsq.0.0037. Accessed 6th of May 2017.

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The very first page of Fun Home illustrates how the presence of Leo Tolstoy’s

Anna Karenina suggests that the narrative of an unhappy family is in no manner

unique. Furthermore, several of the texts Bechdel includes in her graphic memoir

do not seamlessly mirror her lived experience. In the myth of Daedalus and

Icarus, Bruce Bechdel is cast as the Daedalus of décor (Fun Home 6), Icarus who

plummets from the sky (Fun Home 4), and the Minotaur that lies beyond the next

corner (Fun Home 21). In chapter two, Bechdel acknowledges that she doesn’t

actually have her father’s copy of “A Happy Death,” and that the highlighted

quote which would have suitably explained and made her father’s suicide

certain, isn’t highlighted by him but by herself: “I wish I could say I’d accepted

his book, that I still had it, that he’d underlined one particular passage” (47).

While the idea of Bruce highlighting the quote only days before committing

suicide is interesting, the narrator is explicitly aware that this is not the case. The

intertext does not correlate with reality. Similarly, the narrator is explicitly aware

that the man who rescued her father from the mud as a child was a mailman, yet

she chooses to depict him as a milkman: “I know Mort was a mailman, but I

always pictured him as a milkman, all in white – a reverse grim reaper” (Fun

Home 41). Likewise, in Are You My Mother? the narrator explicitly admits that she

doesn’t actually remember conversations between her and her mother: “I don’t

remember the particulars of our play. I’m inventing this dialogue wholesale”

(287). Schlick describes Fun Home as “both highly and rigidly structured, yet also

implicitly critical of its own structuration” (30). When the narrative voice

explicitly explains how “[her] parents are most real to [her] in fictional terms,”

she immediately contradicts her own statement by claiming that “perhaps [her]

cool aesthetic distance itself does more to convey the arctic climate of [her] family

than any particular literary comparison” (Fun Home 67).

Generally, the intertexts that together make Bechdel’s recursive,

fragmented, strongly controlled narrative structure do not correlate seamlessly

to life in the Bechdel family, and the narrator is explicitly aware of this. However,

the text’s neat logic is at times so insistent, so convincing, that the danger of either

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being completely satisfied with the narrative closure it provides, or overtly

critical of its simplification of lived experience, arises (Schlick 31). Bechdel seems

to want her experiences to successfully correspond with the intertexts, so that she

can control them and find a coherent explanation for the ambiguous bond

between herself and her father, their queer sexualities, and to ascertain whether

or not there actually was a “cause-and-effect” relationship between Alison’s

coming-out and his death shortly afterwards (Fun Home 59).

As was established in the second section, Bechdel’s particular use of

closure is significant in her creation of a listener to her testimony. In a testimonial

narrative that relies so heavily upon the reader´s ability to make precise

connections, the narrative voice, our guide in this fragmented reality, plays an

essential role, as is illustrated by the last page of chapter four in Fun Home. The

page depicts several photographs of Bruce and Alison (see figure 2.4). The

narrative voice explains how the photographs were found in the same box as the

one of Roy, suggesting a larger connection between the two. The page is

interesting in both its visual connection between the reader and the drawn hands,

and in its verbal creation of a connection between Bruce and Alison. The page

essentially illustrates how the narrative voice exerts control over the reader´s

interpretation of the panels. The narrator describes Bruce as “lissome, elegant” in

the picture where he wears a women’s bathing suit and explicitly comments “The

exterior setting, the pained grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow

falling across our faces – it’s about as close as a translation can get” about the

other photographs of Bruce and Alison (Fun Home 120). The photographs are

verbally and visually juxtaposed, but without the comments from the narrator

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Figure 2.12 (Fun Home 120)

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one would probably read other things into the photographs; I certainly don’t see

a “pained grin” in either Bruce or Alison’s face. The narrator interprets the

photographs, dictating how the readers should read them as well. The

photographs are drawn in a different style from Bechdel’s other drawings, a

cross-hatched, seemingly more realistic, yet highly impressionistic style, thus

making it difficult for the readers to interpret the details of the photographs

themselves. As a result of this, readers have no difficulty in allowing the narrator

to interpret the photographs for them, taking control of the interpretation. Like

Bruce, Alison seems to want to control her art. The narrator’s description of her

father as a man who “used his skilful artifice not to make things, but to make

things appear to be what they were not. – That is to say impeccable” (see figure

2.15), might almost have been a description of herself.

Figure 2.13 (Fun Home 16)

The narrator’s continual stream of intertextual comparisons, that never work

seamlessly, are not so different from Bruce’s “skilful artifice” (see figure 2.15). As

Chute notes, “The idea of replication—of generation, of reproduction, of

repetition-only-maybe-with-a-difference — haunts Fun Home (“Gothic Revival”

36). Many before me have drawn parallels between the characters of Alison and

Bruce, their creative artifice and imperative for artistic creation. If Bruce tried to

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fill an absence within him with the presence of materialistic beautiful things, then

Alison’s continual narrating of narrative upon narrative might also be read as an

effort to “fill the emotional gaps.”

In an interview about Are You My Mother? Bechdel says: “[there are] so

many big obligatory questions that I didn’t touch on in this book. Like, what has

it been like for my mother to live with the pain of her husband’s suicide? I can’t

ask her that. I can’t even raise that question in the book, because that’s too

painful. So in a way the book is constructed around these big gaping absences”

(Terzian “Family Matters”). While Gloeckner refuses the silent absence that

commonly accompanies trauma by filling her graphic narratives with verbal and

visual depictions of different kinds of abuse, Bechdel is filling her narrative not

with raw depictions of traumatic experiences, but with other narratives. The most

painful moments of Bechdel’s story remain absent. She repeatedly depicts

different perspectives on the moments surrounding her father’s death (Fun Home

28, 59, 89, 116, 117, 232), but chooses not to represent the actual moment when

the truck hits him. Similarly, there are no panels that illustrate Bruce being

intimate with other men. The photograph of Roy on the bed (Fun Home 100) is

the closest thing we get to seeing this side of Bruce. The rest of his story is told

through verbal narration rather than images. Noticeably, Bechdel does not

refrain from depicting other moments that she did not occur or that she did not

witness12, thus her decision not to depict these moments must be based upon

other reasons. Ultimately, the moments that remain absent in Bechdel’s work are

just as revealing as what is present.

By continually constructing stories like a spider web, where every detail

is connected to another story, in search of “the perfect comparison,” Bechdel

12 There are numerous panels depicting the time before Alison was born, especially in chapter three of Fun Home. One panel depicts an alternative reality where the truck does not hit Alison’s father (Fun Home 59). Another panel depicts an imagined moment where a young Bruce and Helen are walking down the street meeting an alternative Alison as “one of those Eisenhower-era butches” (Fun Home 108). Noticeably, Bechdel makes no visual distinctions between her actual memories and her imagined memories, perhaps suggesting her personal attitude towards the concept of truth and reality.

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Figure 2.14 (Are You My Mother? 244 – 245)

ultimately dismantles her own reality. Schlick employs the words “hall of

mirrors” to describe the mechanisms behind the web of intertexts of Fun Home,

how its tidy logic of narratives that work in parallels ultimately disrupt the

logical of her project, creating an effect of mise-en-abîme (31). Noticeably, Are You

My Mother? specifically includes an actual two-page panel of Alison standing in

front of a mirror, creating the same effect (see figure 2.14). She becomes both

subject and object in the endless row of mirrors: the front page, the first page, the

title of the chapter, numerous panels depicting mirrors or her mother looking in

the mirror; Are You My Mother? is overflowing with mirrors, thus mirroring its

overall effect of as “self-reflexive mise-en-abîme” (243). The narrator seems to

acknowledge the possibility of getting stuck in her compulsive need to interpret

and re-identify: “In one way, what I saw in those mirrors was the self trapped

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inside the self, forever” (see figure 2.15). However, significantly, the narrator also

comments: “I am the one whose drive is being thwarted. – And I am the one who

is thwarting it” (Are You My Mother? 245).

Figure 2.15 (Fun Home 17)

The previous chapter established the different manners in which Gloeckner’s

work purports to re-establish Minnie’s fragmented sense of self. Similarly,

Bechdel’s project also seems to be about re-establishing Alison’s autonomy. Both

artists make a point of depicting themselves in the process of drawing13. Tolmie

claims that “self-expression gives you power over your own memory – and over

your own self /subject” (xviii). Likewise, Chute notes how the self-portrait at the

beginning of “Minnie’s 3rd Love, Or: Nightmare on Polk Street” is a shift in the

perspective of the subject/creator and “reminds us of the author’s creative and

testimonial agency. Her self-representation is as literally marked by her

productive act of drawing” (Graphic Women 67 – 68). Bechdel’s project is not only

about re-production, but also about crafting, creating. Ultimately, the panel

13 Examples of panels that depict Minnie or Alison in the act of drawing are found on the

following locations: Fun Home: 129-131, 168-171; Are You My Mother? 130-133, 142-144; A

Child’s Life: 76, 88; Diary: 175, 203.

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below becomes a symbol for Bechdel’s entire work. Bruce and Alison have

switched places, and while the art she produces might not be flawless, the result

is nonetheless striking.

Through a self-reflexive mise-en-abîme, the gaps are simultaneously filled

and left opened. The aporia between signifier and signified, the “I think” which

hangs over Bechdel’s narrative, a narrative in which its protagonist is still

troubled by the space between word and meaning, effectively speaks to the

unspeakability of trauma. Thus, Bechdel’s narrative is a reflection of fragmented

memory and of a testimonial narrative in need of a listener. Its depiction of the

ultimate crisis of representation in the face of death, and finally, its

deconstruction of self and of narrative, through a multiplicity and fragmentation

of selves and narratives, completes Bechdel’s impossible task of representing the

unrepresentable. Chute’s claim that Bechdel’s depictions of trauma is powerful

precisely because she “doesn’t claim to fully represent trauma, nor does [she]

sink into an “ethic of the inconsolable, the unrepresentable,” ultimately rings true

(Graphic Women 182).

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Conclusion

This thesis has explored the different manners in which cartoonists Phoebe

Gloeckner and Alison Bechdel employ the comics medium to represent the

unreal reality of traumatic experience. My aim has been to show the multiple

ways in which different features of the comics medium can be applied to

accurately represent traumatic experience.

The two chapters were dedicated to exploring the different ways that each

of the authors applies the grammar of the comics medium to enhance our

understanding of the different aspects of traumatic experience. I began by

examining Gloeckner’s multiple approaches to the (un)representability of sexual

abuse in Diary and A Child’s Life. Through comparison of her two graphic

memoirs, I found that each of them shows very different attitudes towards the

representation of trauma: sexual abuse is depicted visually and explicitly in A

Child’s Life, whereas Diary generally presents similar topics through verbal

narration. Gloeckner’s understanding of the comics medium results in two very

different approaches to reach the same goal: ultimately, A Child’s Life and Diary

both demonstrate effective techniques for representing different aspects of the

unreal reality of sexual abuse. Bechdel’s graphic memoirs show a different, more

implicit approach to representing trauma. Bechdel’s trauma hides in-between the

lines on the page, rather than the explicit approach of A Child’s Life.

Next, I turned my attention towards the ways in which Gloeckner employs

the panels and gutters of a comics page to authentically represent the fragmented

quality of traumatic recollection. Through close-reading and close-looking of

Gloeckner’s “Fun Things To Do With Little Girls,” I found that the three-page

narrative resonates well with Caruth and Felman’s notions about traumatic

memory. Gloeckner’s narrative is simultaneously fragmented and sustained.

Felman’s notion of traumatic experience as “outside the parameters of “normal”

reality, such as causality, sequence, place and time” resonates well with both

Gloeckner and Bechdel’s work. With regards to Fun Home and Are You My

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Mother?, I found that the fragmented, recursive and non-linear organisation of

the graphic memoirs show precisely this collapse of time and space and

successfully represents the fragmented nature of traumatic memory. Bechdel’s

work is wholeheartedly founded upon this recursive non-linear narrative

structure; memories are persistently re-presented and re-framed. While “Fun

Things To Do With Little Girls,” shows related attitudes to the visual and

fragmented nature of traumatic recollection, the multimodal form of Diary also

shows similar features, although its organisation is completely different from A

Child’s Life.

Furthermore, I examined the role of the reader with regards to establishing

Gloeckner’s work as a testimonial narrative. Through a persistent visual

connection between the protagonist and the reader in A Child’s Life and a more

verbal connection between narrator and reader in Diary, Gloeckner warrants that

her readers acknowledge their important role as listeners to her testimony. I

found that Diary’s multi-modal organisation, with its diary entries, poems,

illustrations and comic strips, resonates with Felman’s observation of the

fragmented character of witnessing (223). Although Bechel’s work also presents

itself as testimonial narratives, the tools for creating a listener to her testimony

are rather different. I observed how the role of closure becomes a key feature in

creating an active listener to Bechdel’s testimony. Her work distinguishes itself

from other graphic narratives in its extraordinarily high degree of closure.

Moreover, a close-looking at Alison’s crisis of representation, showed that

that the visual and verbal tension of comics were the foundation for representing

a crisis of language and a crisis of representation in the face of trauma. By

replacing absence with presence, the depicting the crisis of representation,

Bechdel challenges the notion that trauma is unspeakable and unrepresentable.

Lastly, I examined the role of intertextuality in Bechdel and the complex

relationship between Gloeckner and her avatar and found that the illustrations

made by the adult Gloeckner shows, rather than explains, the effects of the split

self. The distinct perspectives of Minnie and Gloeckner here find a space where

103

they can merge. With regards to Bechdel’s use of intertextuality, her continual

comparisons between her father’s life and authors or fictional characters may

seem like an opportunity to seek affirmation, but eventually carry out the work

of deconstruction. On Bechdel’s mission to find “the perfect” comparison, she

takes the risk of destabilising the reality of her life.

To write about verbal and visual representations of traumatic experience

without discussing the cathartic aspect of writing and drawing seems almost

impossible. The notion of writing as a therapeutic tool is exemplified in Køhlert’s

“Working It Through,” where he describes how he considers Gloeckner’s Diary

to be “a kind of therapeutic manoeuvre as the traumatic past has been sifted

through, organized and made to cohere by the subjectivity of its adult author”

(139). While this belief might seem persuasive, I find it to be a simplification of

reality. Although some survivors of trauma will certainly find relief in writing

about their traumatic experience, neither Gloeckner nor Bechdel shows signs of

healing through their work. Contrastingly, each of the four graphic narratives

ends with either a sense of a sustained pain or with happy endings that are too

happy, too complete to be of a convincing quality. Gloeckner explicitly rejects the

idea of healing through her work: “Art doesn’t seek a cure. Therapy does. I’m

not trying to cure myself with my art. The idea seems ridiculous” (“The Phoebe

Gloeckner Interview”). Similarly, Bechdel describes with reference to her family

how “[she] had this fantasy that this book [Fun Home] was going to heal us and

bring us together. I was going to tell the truth and everything would be out in

the open ... That didn’t happen” (“I don’t know why I reveal these things”). Both

authors seem to reject the notion of healing through writing. Rather I would like

to suggest that creating verbal and visual representations of trauma will generate

a deeper understanding of the dynamics of the event. By depicting traumatic

experience, I believe the artists achieve a sense of control over their experience.

Both authors also include panels that depict themselves in the process of

drawing, thus showing the readers the significance of self-expression. Through

self-expression, both artists seem to reclaim a sense of subjectivity and autonomy.

104

My close-looking and close-reading of the four graphic memoirs has

revealed some of comics’ specific representational tools, tools that would be

difficult if not impossible to recreate in any other known medium. With gutters,

panels, verbal, and visual narratives that simultaneously combine and separate

thoughts and ideas, conveys a complete narrative, or in many cases

communicates a multiplicity of different narratives, layer upon layers of separate

stories that together show a medium without limitations. While a few scholars14

have argued that the literary value and potential of the comics’ medium is no

longer up for debate, I cannot help but disagree. Although scholars are beginning

to open their eyes to the fascinating world of comics and eliminate embedded

notions such as the belief that the medium merely applies to adolescents, there is

still a long way to go with people outside of academia. In his introduction to Joe

Sacco’s Palestine, Edward Said observes how “most adults […] tend to connect

comics with what is frivolous or ephemeral, and there is an assumption that as

one grows older they are put aside for more serious pursuits” (ii). Throughout

this project I’ve encountered similar attitudes, alongside a strong sense of

confusion and bewilderment when describing the essence of my thesis to people

outside of my academic field. Many have expressed difficulties in picturing

comics as something else than manga, children’s cartoons, or satirical comic

strips for adults. However, I strongly believe that when introduced to graphic

narratives such as Maus, Waltz with Bashir, Palestine, and Persepolis, in addition to

the work of Phoebe Gloeckner and Alison Bechdel, readers will immediately

notice the medium’s potential to relate important life narratives in remarkably

innovative ways. Graphic memoirs such as the ones above might play a

significant role in expanding the target group of comics. Many of the comics that

have made it to the best seller lists, have been precisely autobiographical comics.

When graphic memoirs such as Maus, Fun Home and Persepolis reach larger

audiences, a possible side effect of this is that the average person will be more

14 See Hillary Chute and Marianne DeKoven‘s “Introduction” (768).

105

open to reading other kinds of graphic narrative. Today, there is a new wave of

popular comics, and while many of them belong within the superhero genre,

maybe it will also open new doors for the other genres of graphic narrative?

Hopefully, this thesis will participate in the work of spreading knowledge and

awareness of the endless opportunities of the comics medium. Edward Said

describes his own discovery of the possibilities of comics in these words:

“In ways that I still find fascinating to decode, comics in their relentless

foregrounding – far more, say, than film cartoons or funnies, neither of

which mattered much to me – seemed to say what couldn’t otherwise be

said, perhaps what wasn’t permitted to be said or imagined, defying the

ordinary processes of thought, which are policed, shaped and re-shaped

by all sorts of pedagogical as well as ideological pressures. I knew nothing

of this then, but I felt that comics freed me to think and imagine and see

differently” (ii).

The feeling that the unrestrained medium of comics allows one to think, imagine,

and see differently is certainly something with which I can relate. Gloeckner and

Bechdel’s graphic memoirs involve themselves in important discussions of

traumatic recollection, the role of self-representation in autobiography, the

unreal reality of trauma and the (un)representability of traumatic experience.

Without giving explicit responses to these debates, they expose and explore the

complexities within them. While traditional literary devices may not be suited

for rendering traumatic events, Whitehead argues that “the more experimental

forms emerging out of postmodernist and postcolonial fiction offer the

contemporary novelist a promising vehicle for communicating the unreality of

trauma” (87). The comics medium offer precisely the promising vehicle for

communicating the unreal reality of traumatic experience.

106

107

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